A roundup of some personal favorites.
I hope your Christmas and/or Hanukkah celebrations are treating you well. Since we’re in the doldrums between the first day of Christmas and the New Year, I figured I’d put together a reading list of some of the most fun, moving, and insightful NR pieces from the last few years — further, each reflects something about the author and his work that I admire. Lives get busy, and I’ll bet we all missed a few of these when they were initially published.
I plumbed the depths, and here’s what I found.
Flags of Our Fathers — Charles C. W. Cooke
When considering how a given political claim is likely to fare once it has traveled outside of the bubble in which it originated, my go-to yardstick is to imagine the reception that it would receive in an average American bar. Given recent events, I have grown tempted to shift the setting of this admirably dependable test elsewhere — say, to the lunchroom of a high-security lunatic asylum.
Gullible’s Fellow Travelers — Noah Rothman
The United Nations has some bad news. The Gaza Strip’s fragile economy has been so catastrophically disrupted by the war its governing authority started on October 7 that it will take no fewer than 350 years for this tiny plot of land to recover. An editor of the Guardian reproduced the accusation, and his colleagues published his thoughts on the matter apparently without evincing any skepticism toward the claim.
The assessment is a pristine example of why straight-line projections are inherently fallacious. The U.N. report that produced this dubious conclusion notes that almost all economic activity in sectors including agriculture, manufacturing, and services has ground nearly to a halt — as one might expect amid ongoing counterinsurgency operations.
Vin Scully and Me: A Family Story — Dan McLaughlin
They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. The larger-than-life hero in my life was Vin Scully. For millions of people, he was like a member of the family. For me, he was. He was my mom’s brother, and it was just the two of them. How could he not be my hero? He died Tuesday at 94, just shy of the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death. He lived as rich and meaningful a life as any man could hope for, yet he endured many tragedies. We shall miss him deeply, as will the whole world of baseball.
Cat Fights Replace Budget Battles — Armond White
Considering the reality-TV show that the U.S. Congress has become, last week’s congressional melee between Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett can be traced to one cultural force: TV producer Andy Cohen. Cohen’s world-renowned Real Housewives cable-TV series has altered the public role of women, as was proven by the fracas that began when Greene asked whether any Democrats on the Oversight Committee are employing Loren Merchan, daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who is tyrannizing the court in the current Trump case in Manhattan.
Lovecraft’s Limitations — Jack Butler
There are certain recurring elements in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The horrifying cosmic entity Cthulhu. The Necronomicon, a cursed tome of forbidden knowledge. Certain words recur, too, such as “Cyclopean.” When Lovecraft really wanted to convey the monstrous nature of what he was attempting to describe in his horror tales, though, “blasphemous” frequently seemed the best way to communicate the utterly alien, offensive, and profane quality of his subjects. It is a telling choice, one that helps illustrate the distinct and enduring quality of his work.
The Youngest Old Man in Oklahoma — Mark Antonio Wright
When I was 17, I tore the labrum inside my left shoulder while fooling around in a boxing ring. The tear caused instability and weakness in the joint, and for a few years, I would often get the sensation that my arm was “popping out of its socket” when I was, say, delivering a big tackle on the rugby pitch. Unfortunately, the abominable thing would also sometimes pop out when I was doing something completely innocuous — such as reaching up to grab a cup from the top shelf.
The Latin Mass Is for You and Me — Michael Brendan Dougherty
Catholics who prefer what is called the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) have been praying and fretting about mere rumors for decades. Twenty years ago, I remember rumors of an imminent reconciliation between the pope and the breakaway traditionalist group the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), which would have brought 500 Latin Mass priests into the universal Church. Months later, there were rumors in the opposite direction, of some terrible withdrawal of permission — a permission then called “the indult” — for saying the traditional Mass at all.
Ballerinas Can Be Mothers, Too — Abigail Anthony
The Times recently profiled the “Ballerina Farm” enterprise and its face, Hannah Neeleman. Neeleman is a Juilliard-trained ballerina and member of the LDS Church who now competes in beauty pageants while living on an expansive Utah farm with her eight children and billionaire husband Daniel, the heir to several commercial airlines. She shares her unconventional life on social media to millions of followers: Video snippets show her milking cows, attending rodeos, preparing for pageants, cooking from scratch as little children assist as sous chefs, and dancing ballet. The footage is aesthetically pleasing because the Utah landscape is stunning and because Hannah is effortlessly beautiful, which very few women can accomplish while tending to sheep.
Jihad Is Incompatible with the West — Andy McCarthy
There is a lesson to be drawn from Thursday night’s sharia-supremacist pogrom against Jews — not Zionists, Jews — in the Islamic Emirate of Amsterdam, formerly known as the capital of the Netherlands, the beating heart of transnational-progressive, multicultural, post-sovereign Europe. It’s a lesson I’ve been writing about here for over 20 years, but now is an opportune time for a refresher, with Donald Trump’s election as president having opened the possibility of a new American national-security footing.
A Christmas at the Museum — Brian T. Allen
Christmas is a time for reminiscing, which has been my theme for the last couple of weeks, and for staying home in ye olde Arlington in rural Vermont. We’re cursed with loudmouth, throwback hippie socialists in high places, but Arlington’s a pretty, quiet town bracketed by mountains and made famous by Norman Rockwell, who lived and did his best work here from the 1930s into the ’50s. He used locals as models for the Four Freedoms, and he was much liked for organizing square dances. Grandma Moses lived a few miles away, as did Robert Frost, who wrote his best poetry here.
Extirpate the Smartphone’s Presence from Learning Spaces — Judson Berger
Teachers were on the lookout. Noisy, disruptive communication devices were being smuggled into the classroom by students. For what possible purpose would they need to keep in contact with anyone outside school walls? Drug-dealing, probably. There couldn’t be any other explanation.
This blessedly quaint view of connectivity more or less informed how school administrators and policy-makers dealt with that pocket-sized menace of the late ’80s and ’90s: beepers. That is, mercilessly. Many schools and regions banned the devices, and even suspended students or referred them to the police for violations — only to face pushback from parents and others for reasons that, today, will look familiar.
Birth is Much Safer than Some Want You to Know — Brittany Bernstein
Dr. Ingrid Skop, an ob-gyn and vice president and director of medical affairs for the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, regularly has women in her office who have read news reports on the so-called maternal health-care crisis in the U.S., which is said to have the highest rate of maternal mortality of any high-income country.
“What I tell [them] is that we have had troubles with our data, and we’ve put some systems in place that have helped to detect more deaths. When it looks like the rates are rising, it is probably because we are doing a better job of detecting as opposed to actually having more deaths,” she said, adding “the good news is the death that you’re worried about, a catastrophic event at the time of birth, those rates are improving dramatically.”
Get Rekt, Commies — Jeff Blehar
Have you heard? Chinese social media is apparently very upset about the American performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics. And just for one second here, let’s try to empathize: I too would be dismayed if I were an incel trapped at home online under 24-hour authoritarian panopticon supervision by all 1.4 billion of my fellow Chinamen and nothing but a logographic language to express myself with. And I’d be even more ticked off if the whole disproportionate lot of them couldn’t justify their existence — even with a massive state-run athletics program — by outstripping a mere 325 million upstart American jerkwads at the Olympics.
Bill Buckley Stood Athwart the World and Won — Rick Brookhiser
Bill’s first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951. His TV show Firing Line wrapped in 1999. Those are the brackets of a career. 1951–65, his run for mayor of New York City, was the ascent. 1965–89, the end of the Reagan era, was the peak. From then until 1999 he was a Grand Old Man. Last century, last millennium. He performed in and against a world that was different from ours. How?
The great political difference, abroad but at home too, was the ever-presence of communism commanded by the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin looks bad now, and is, but comparing him with his predecessors, I cannot forget the judgment of the émigré cabbie who, after telling me how much he admired Stalin — “He killed Germany” — slapped his dashboard and snorted, “Putin is little officer.”
Hong Kong at the Gallows — Nat Brown
At the end of March [2020], when the U.S. began to shut down as the severity of the coronavirus pandemic increased, New York Times op-ed columnist and NR movie critic Ross Douthat put his finger on an uncanny psychological side effect of what was happening. “The strangest thing about this crisis,” he tweeted, “is what you might call the not-yet/but-already experience — where things that haven’t yet happened (symptoms, hospitalizations) are nonetheless settled facts, and we measure the way telescopes catch light from the past, from a dead star.”
Peanut Butter Is the Better Butter — William F. Buckley
For many years I have labored under the burden of an unrequited passion. What have I done for it, in return for all it has done for me? Nothing. But I have wondered what I could use as what journalists call a “peg.”
I have found one. This may strike some of the literal-minded as attenuated, but it goes as follows: This is the centennial year of the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded on the Fourth of July, 1881, by Booker T. Washington. Tuskegee continues to be a remarkable institution, and former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld is the head of a committee of illustrious men and women who are devoting themselves to raising $20 million to encourage it in its noble work.
What noble work? We have arrived at step two. It was, among other things, the principal academic home of George Washington Carver, and it was G. W. Carver who to all intents and purposes invented the peanut. What he did, more specifically, was to document that the cultivation of the peanut despoiled the land far less than the cultivation of cotton, and then he set out to merchandise the peanut in order that there might be a market for it.
Transgenderism and Incarceration Are the Ugliest Bedfellows — Caroline Downey
Female prison guards in California have been traumatized after being forced to perform naked strip searches on male felons under the state department of corrections’ gender-inclusion rules.
For decades, the department prohibited female officers from conducting unclothed strip searches on male inmates except in emergency circumstances, such as when a same-sex officer is not available or if the male inmate is at risk of harming themselves or others.
I Was There the Night Trump Won — Audrey Fahlberg
West Palm Beach – For Donald Trump and his closest allies, vindication has never felt so good.
Inside the Palm Beach County Convention Center at last night’s GOP victory party, Republican after Republican boasted to anyone within earshot that Trump’s decisive victory represents the culmination of a transformative, generational political movement. In interviews and text messages with National Review, even the sleep-deprived Republican lawmakers and operatives who expected a decisive GOP win marveled at the remarkable nature of Trump’s achievement.
Put simply by Republican senator Eric Schmitt on his way out of Trump’s party: “It’s the greatest political comeback in American history.”
And Then There Was Light — Nicholas Frankovich
“It is the inattentive reader who loses the thread, not I,” wrote Montaigne, that great rambler, the father of the essay in its modern form. Less playful and, befitting her topic, more rigorous, Marilynne Robinson in Reading Genesis nonetheless tempts her reader to wonder whether her train of thought has a clear destination.
Imagine someone sharing, uninterrupted, 60,000 words of observation about the Book of Genesis but offering no chapter titles, subheads, signposts, or map of her itinerary. Robinson discourages any bullet-point summary of either scripture or her book. Too neat a dissection of a text would drain its blood. The author respects her subject, Holy Writ, as a living thing, capable of defying insufficiently examined assumptions about its character.
Bring Me Nukes, and Bring Them Quick — John Fund
It’s been over 40 years since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident ground nuclear-power production in the U.S. to a halt. The Energy Department says “no injuries, deaths or direct health effects were caused by the accident,” but it took decades before a new nuclear plant finally opened in Georgia last year. A new sodium-fueled fast reactor is now being built in Wyoming.
Even the Biden administration has announced it will be removing barriers to the construction of new nuclear plants in response to pleas from investors who are lining up to finance new projects. Investment in advanced fission technologies grew more than tenfold, to $3.9 billion, in the first seven months of 2024 from $355 million in all of 2023.
Men in Make-up No Pageant Worth Watching Make — Madeleine Kearns
Last month, three American beauty queens, including the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA title holders, resigned within days of each other. Publicly, they gave vague explanations — mental-health concerns in one case, in another “personal values no longer” being in alignment with the organization.
The pageant participants are restricted in what they can say about the organization by nondisclosure agreements. On May 10, however, the New York Times published a leaked eight-page resignation letter by Noelia Voigt (Miss USA 2023), citing “a toxic work environment within the Miss USA Organization that, at best, is poor management and, at worst, bullying and harassment.”
What Chevron‘s Disappearance Means for Congress — Zach Kessel
When the Chevron case was first decided by the Supreme Court in 1984, no one involved realized they were witnessing a landmark decision that would grow the administrative state beyond all recognition in just a few short decades.
Legal observers at the time believed that the ruling in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which established a two-part test for deciding when a court must defer to a government agency’s reading of laws or statutes, would simply empower a democratically accountable executive to make determinations around the margins.
Mower-Men (and Lawn-Ladies) Unite — James Lileks
I have lawnbrain. I think, therefore I mow.
I know I have carbrain. That’s the contemptuous word for people who do not feel agonizing guilt about driving an automobile. If you think 75-year-old people with bad knees shouldn’t drive a bike in the middle of winter to get groceries, but should drive in their big nice warm Eldorado, you have carbrain.
There’s a discussion board on Reddit called “f***cars,” with the asterisks substituting for a naughty word. They are so passionate! So genuine! There’s also one called “f***lawns,” castigating the lawnbrained. They hate lawns, particularly if they are Boomer-groomed. You can imagine the usual reasons: chemicals. Lawn mowers that burn the evil ichor and hasten the death of the planet (now scheduled for 10:38 a.m., March 7, 2041). Racist origins. Hierarchical capitalist oppression, inasmuch as someone who has a lawn can tell someone to get off it.
Gratitude Is the ‘tude for Me — Kathryn Jean Lopez
Gratitude. It shouldn’t be that hard. Everything we have is a gift. Beginning with our very lives. That’s not the stuff of politics much anymore. We are not in the days of “Morning in America.” We live at a time when anger and tearing others down is the trend. But that’s not going to work when we need hope.
This might sound silly, but out walking one day during the Covid lockdowns, I encountered a new flower with the most enchanting powdery scent. It was such a simple thing but also glorious. On another evening, I heard a birds’ concert — it’s just what they do and who they are. Small, natural and yet magnificent things.
Caitlin Clark Is Balling Out — Rich Lowry
I called a long-time friend the other day, a fellow sports fan, to catch up, and we spent the first 20 minutes talking about women’s professional basketball.
Neither of us had ever exhibited the slightest interest in the WNBA, but both of us, simultaneously, unbeknownst to the other, had become Caitlin Clark fans.
There are transformational players who change the competitive balance in a league or change how the game is played, but it’s rare to come across players who lift an entire league on their shoulders.
Christmas in Frankenmuth — John J. Miller
Nicole Whitaker says she never gets sick of Christmas, even though she has celebrated it every day at work for the last 29 years. Her job is to help stock the items at Bronner’s, which calls itself “the world’s largest Christmas store.” That’s a plausible boast, given that Bronner’s sells about 2 million ornaments each year, plus Nativity scenes, trees, stockings, Bibles, and more, from a seven-acre building that includes more than two acres of retail space. “It’s a happy place,” says Whitaker. “You see smiles everywhere.”
She’s not even weary of the store’s Christmas music, which plays year-round, though she admits that she often tunes it out. “Then sometimes I’ll get in my car and put on Christmas carols for the drive home,” says Whitaker, who parks among the 1,470 spaces that surround the complex.
The Status of State Newspaper Impartiality Is Grim — Ryan Mills
Michigan voters looking for voting advice in the state’s critical U.S. Senate race are told by the Detroit Free Press’s editorial board that Republican Mike Rogers “relies on tough-guy talk and manufactured outrage to appeal to voters.”
In Florida, Republican Senator Rick Scott is a “partisan apologist” who is rich but “pretends to be a champion of the little guy,” according to the left-wing Palm Beach Post.
Pennsylvania Republican Dave McCormick has a simple pitch to voters, the Philadelphia Inquirer says: “Everything is terrible, and it’s all [Democratic incumbent Bob] Casey’s fault.”
Taking Poems to Heart — Jay Nordlinger
I have never been much of a poem-memorizer. You? But I have always liked the idea of memorizing poems. (“I like the idea of being fit and slim. Not that I’ll ever do anything about it.”) Lately, I have taken the trouble to memorize a few poems. “Trouble” is the wrong word, really. It’s a pleasure — or at least a worthy exercise.
We could “count the ways” (speaking of poetry).
When I was in high school, I memorized a French poem: “L’hippopotame,” by Gautier. The other week, I re-memorized it. Was the task easier, because I had memorized the poem more than 40 years before? You know, I think it was, believe it or not.
Providence and Hell-Raisers — John O’Sullivan
“I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?” — President Donald Trump
“One hand fired and another hand guided the bullet.” — Pope John Paul II
“Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” — President Donald Trump
“Whatever time I have left belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs.” — President Ronald Reagan
“In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.” — Pope John Paul II
Two months ago, I was invited to give a talk — presented in full below — at an international conference on the achievements of President Ronald Reagan put on by the Peter Pazmany Catholic University in Budapest. Looking down the list of other contributors and their topics, I had the usual annoying feeling that there was nothing left of any significance for me to say. Then I noticed that none of the other speakers had chosen topics that would touch naturally on one of the most remarkable things about Reagan — namely, the extreme unlikelihood in the liberal 1970s that such a firm conservative would ever be elected president in the first place. Yet today, Reagan’s rise and successful presidency seem an almost inevitable response to the rising stagflation and Soviet menace of those years.
Canada Is Poor — Dominic Pino
Last month I wrote a post about a comparison of GDP per capita between U.S. states and Canadian provinces. It found that Ontario would be the fifth-poorest U.S. state, Quebec would be second-poorest, and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island would each be the poorest U.S. state, as measured by economic output per person.
A new report from the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free-market think tank, looks at income instead of output, and its findings are even worse for Canada. In a ranking of the 50 U.S. states and ten Canadian provinces by median earnings per person, all ten provinces line up at the bottom, occupying spots 51–60. Every U.S. state has higher median earnings per person than Alberta, the richest Canadian province.
God and Man Get the Axe at the New York Times — Ramesh Ponnuru
“News analysis” is one of the slipperier terms in journalism. It’s often a way for ostensibly neutral reporters to put their political views forward via loose associations rather than argument: a way, that is, to run a crummy op-ed while pretending to be doing something else.
The New York Times is running that kind of news analysis under the headline, “Alito’s ‘Godliness’ Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement.” Right away, there’s a problem, since Alito didn’t actually even say the word “godliness.”
Warner Bros. Get Cozy with the CCP — Jimmy Quinn
Warner Bros. Discovery’s production of videos in partnership with Chinese state media to whitewash the Uyghur genocide has inspired a bill to bar the Pentagon from working with entertainment companies that collaborate with Beijing’s propaganda organs.
Representative Jim Banks (R., Ind.) proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense-policy bill, that would block Pentagon funds from going to partnerships any company engaged in cooperation with Chinese propaganda organs. In practice, this would block the Defense Department from lending studios military equipment and vehicles for use in films and television shows.
Women, Please Beware Bears — Luther Ray Abel
Have you ever stopped mid hike to listen to an ominous lumbering sound populating the deep brush and, in that moment of terror before a cheeky squirrel is revealed, thought, “Would I rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” This hypothetical, popularized recently on TikTok, has made its way to downstream social media, with women answering in forums and videos that they’d rather be alone in a forest with a bear than a man. As one might expect, more than a few men (and women) find this knee-jerk preference for sharing a bit of arboreal real estate with wild Ursus rather than Frank from Lac du Flambeau incredibly dense and downright offensive.
A Rodeo Rookie Romps with Roans — Vahaken Mouradian
Bareback bronc doesn’t look as fun as it sounds. A fearsome sight: lurch, rear kick, 180-degree spin, thump-thump-thrash. If one hoof is touching the ground, at least two aren’t. The mad undulation of a runaway seesaw. We’re not even three seconds in yet. Lightning punctures the somber Sangre de Cristo slopes as if it’s part of the show. No need for pyrotechnics. Look away if you can: A crash-test dummy is demonstrating Newton’s second law of motion while hitched to the back of an equine bodybuilder. The beast has a neck like Ronnie Coleman’s left quadricep. Who taught it to perform superman push-ups? Buck-spin’s the move: The cowboy’s center of gravity momentarily shifts to someplace over equatorial Asia. The timer goes off; his chaps take wing —— horizontal ejection. Godspeed and good night. Hearing the thud alone makes me slip a spinal disc. It’s my first rodeo.
“Son of a biscuit!”
“Is he all right?”
Flying High — Sarah Schutte
If we hadn’t tried to leave, we might’ve missed it completely. At 4 p.m. during the air show here, worried that I’d worn out my siblings and friend with one too many airplanes, I headed with them to the exit. We’d been at the event since 9 a.m., walking the expansive grounds and gazing in awe at hundreds of aircraft, but we still had two more days and I thought we needed to pace ourselves. So it was that we found ourselves near the show’s centerline when the announcer started acting strange.
It sounded like he was yelling at someone to get off the runway area. Unsure whether he was joking or not, we stepped closer. A black tailwheel sat on the runway, its female pilot out of the cockpit at that moment and checking something on the plane’s tail. Suddenly, a guy in a white tank top dashed past her, hopped into the cockpit, and roared down the runway as pilot and announcer yelled excitedly. Leaping into the air, the rogue plane seemed to skim across the runway, barely clearing its surface, and then went into a terrifying nosedive.
The Javier Melee — Andrew Stuttaford
It was in a large, packed room in the Hilton. A conference held in June by the Cato Institute and an Argentine free-market think tank, Libertad y Progreso, had entered its final hours. Elon Musk had just spoken — remotely. Now self-styled anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since December, had turned up, clad in a suit, not his trademark leather jacket, and, considerably calmer than his reputation, was giving a speech.
He ranged from hard-core economic theory — the translator muttering in my headset struggled a bit with that — to philosophy, to the merits of markets, of liberty, of property, to the demerits of Argentina’s political class — “the caste” — to the governor of Buenos Aires Province, “a communist midget.” At the end, a fiftysomething local told me that he’d been waiting all his life for an Argentine president to make a speech like that.
The Bourgeoisie Brood and Their Broke LARPing — Kayla Bartsch
It is an injustice to the English language to describe the chaos lawn games on college campuses as “protests.”
For the few voices crying, “These kids might be dumb, but doesn’t anyone believe in freedom of speech anymore?!” — there is a stark contrast between a student rally and a days-long encampment that’s so disruptive it shuts down in-person classes, results in violent riots, and blocks Jewish students from accessing university buildings. The criteria of time, place, and manner remain.
I digress — despite the unfit means, the pro-terrorism “protests” on campus aren’t proper protests at all with regard to their content.
The students camping out on quads long to be part of an elite “activist class.” With this denomination come status, job opportunities, and funding — some are already paid for their activist efforts.
Peter Pan’s Parlor at Auction — Haley Strack
Peter Pan was born in the garden of a Georgian mansion. James Matthew Barrie, writer and creator of the beloved character, conjured Pan into being in the yard of Moat Brae in Dumfries, Scotland, where he played pirates and fairies and dreamt of Neverland.
Barrie often visited the house — originally built in 1823 and nicknamed Number One Dumfries — when he was a teenager. From 1873 to 1878, he attended Dumfries Academy, located conveniently near Moat Brae, which was owned by Barrie’s boyhood friends, Stuart and Hal Gordon. In the half acre of gardens Moat Brae enclosed, Barrie and the Gordon brothers imagined Neverland. Barrie in a 1924 speech said that their “escapades in a certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work,” Peter Pan. The five years Barrie spent roaming the land “were probably the happiest of my life, for indeed I have loved this place.”
Musical Entropy — Jason Lee Steorts
Someone directed me to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, “Secret Mathematical Patterns Revealed in Bach’s Music” (February 16, this year). It reports on a study that attempted to quantify the “information entropy” or “surprise” in some of Bach’s compositions. But the study’s way of describing musical surprise is limited, and it will identify as surprising certain kinds of musical passages that really are not.
Vibes Only Count in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades — Jim Geraghty
The early spin on Kamala Harris selecting Minnesota governor Tim Walz is that he’s a terrific pick because Walz gives off the right “vibe.” Mike Murphy assures us that Walz has a “moderate vibe,” distinct from his “labor liberal record. Second media look, if honest, will note this is most progressive D ticket since Dukakis.” Jonathan Martin reports that Harris had a better “vibe” with Walz than with Shapiro.
When people say Walz has a “moderate vibe,” they mean he’s a heavyset, bald, glasses-and-flannel-wearing Midwesterner who looks like he could be a guy behind the counter at a hardware store, recommending the Phillips-head machine screw over the flathead machine screw.
The good “vibes” on Walz require averting your eyes from his record as governor, one embarrassing and egregious large-scale scandal of waste, fraud, and mismanagement after another.
And the undisputed best piece of the year (if one is judging by helices per word, anyway):
Charlie and Luther’s Most Excellent Whizzbang American Roller-Coaster Adventure — Charles C. W. Cooke & Luther Ray Abel
It would be a road trip for the sake of a road trip, with the attractions we found along the way providing the purpose. It would, we decided, be Charlie and Luther’s Most Excellent Whizzbang American Road-Trip Adventure.
And yet, despite that jumble of words and ideas, it seemed to us that there was an ingredient still missing. The taco was ready, but the hot sauce was lacking. And then, like a fly landing on the end of our noses, it appeared: roller coaster.
Really, what else could it be? Is it even possible to string together such a title without injecting “roller coaster” into it? What could be more excellent? What could be more American? What could be more adventurous? “Charlie and Luther’s Most Excellent American Roller-Coaster Adventure.” Whizzbang!
And so, over the course of eight cyclonic, madcap, sun-and-rain-soaked days, the two of us drove 2,765 miles by car, flew 2,591 miles by plane, rode 34 roller coasters — which, taken together, threw us upside-down 107 times and dropped us 5,570 feet (that’s more than a mile and twice the height of the Burj Khalifa) — stayed in hotels and motels of profoundly varying repute, ate every type of roadside food we could imagine, and made our mark on 15 of these United States. We visited cities and got lost in the wilderness. We saw splendor and dilapidation. We rummaged back roads and we drove highways. We went, that is to say, to America — with all its many faces, fantasies, and foibles. Simon, Garfunkel, Kathy, and that man in the gabardine suit — eat your hearts out!
Read the rest here. Listen about it here.
May your travels and celebrations be fulfilling, without ice (except in a tumbler cooling something brown), and good for all.