Columns, pieces and posts
In October it will be 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis, which has been called the most dangerous crisis in recorded history. The Soviet Union had secretly placed missiles in a base in Cuba; the U.S. discovered them through secret aerial photographs. What would President John F. Kennedy do, less than two years into […]
Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine must be received soberly, if for no other reason than that leaders occasionally do what they say they’ll do. There are reasons beyond that. He has lost hardware, soldiers, ground and face. He is cornered and escalating, increasing the odds of mistake and miscalculation. Great care […]
“For the British people, Victoria was more than an individual, more even than the queen,” Robert K. Massie wrote in “Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.” “She was—and had been as long as most of them could remember—a part of the fabric of their lives. She embodied history, tradition, government, and […]
London I am not sentimental about the special relationship between the U.S. and Britain but fully support it. Nations have to look out for their own interests, but in a dangerous world you keep old friends close. We came from them: The Magna Carta flowed into our Declaration, the English and Scottish Enlightenments helped form […]
I found myself unshocked by the abortion vote in Kansas, and I don’t understand the shock of others. America has come to poll consistently in favor of abortion in the first trimester with support declining in the second and cratering in the third. The people of Kansas were asked if they’d like to remove any […]
Where are we in the office wars? I think there’s an armistice between the return-to-the-office side and the work-from-home forces. Perhaps hostilities will resume in the fall. Bosses are hoping the old reality will snap back as the drama of 2020-22 recedes, that people will start to feel they need to come back, or can […]
We’re in the midst of breath-catching revolutions in how America lives and works. Working from home, as an issue, is still shaking itself out, but its implications are huge. If an entire class of people who used to go to the office stay home, it will upend the commuter model on which modern cities are […]
Public opinion on how America does its policing has devolved into two camps. The first is highly progressive, driven by ideological certitudes and made possible by a generally limited experience of life. These are the defund-the-police people, small in number and suffering in public support but effective at pushing their agenda through highly ideological district […]
On Boris Johnson, a bad man met a bad end. He was shallow, frivolous, insincere even for a politician, almost purely cynical, believed in little but himself. Because of this the things he got right had the shadow of the merely performative. He led a Tory Party that no longer seems to believe in anything, […]
Only a woman would have done what Cassidy Hutchinson did because only a woman, in a place of such power and prestige, would have registered everything and taken such close notes instead of spending that time swanning around being important. Here she was, all by herself, 26 years old, in front of the whole country. […]