A few years ago, no one would have predicted a site like www.SaveOurStarbucks.com. Created by entrepreneur Paul Konrardy after the financially troubled coffee chain announced in July that it would be closing 600 American stores, the site gives loyal customers a place to sign petitions urging the corporation to take their beloved shops off the [...]
The man sitting next to me is having a rough day. Bleary-eyed, shirt untucked, hair in mild disarray: He looks like life is moving faster than he’d like. Apparently, he thinks so as well; he’s reading a piece of Jehovah’s Witness literature on “How to Take Control of Your Life.” He’s sucking down his second beer with obvious relish, and it’s enough to make me think about getting a pint. But I won’t. Because we’re on a bus, and it’s 6:45 in the morning. Just another day on Foothill Transit, Line 187: the Murder Bus.
Whoever was in charge of deciding what to call each generation of feminism knew what she was doing when she settled on the metaphor of waves: Do what you will, they just keep coming. Well, the next wave has arrived.
Reverend Sun Myung Moon—South Korean leader of the Unification Church, convicted tax felon, minister of mass weddings, and self-proclaimed Messiah—is just one of many peculiar features of “America’s Newspaper,” as the Washington Times calls itself. But pick up a copy of the Times today and, aside from its still vociferously conservative opinion pages, you might mistake it for a regular newspaper.
All is the president of the eponymous David All Group (DAG), “the nation’s first conservative Web 2.0 agency.” All founded the group in 2007—the same year he launched Slatecard.com, a fundraising site for Republicans, and TechRepublican, a blog focusing on the intersection of politics and technology. All is not just looking to bridge the technological divide between Democrats and Republicans—he’s moving one step ahead.
Things hadn’t been well for a long time. He could afford to admit it now that it was all over, and he had returned home from the funeral, his mind starved of sleep. No tears, lamentations, or gaunt silences had marked his behavior. None of that or those solid chesty hugs friends give at times [...]
Maybe it’s fucking that’s in the air, and we just call it “love” because, under ideal circumstances, fucking ends up identified with love, the way coal may become a diamond if conditions are just so. One Catholic guy’s plea for modesty in an age of increasingly meaningless vulgarity.
This advice columnist doesn’t care if she hurts your feelings. Every week in a column syndicated in over 100 papers across America, Amy Alkon delivers hilariously hard-nosed counsel to thousands of clueless souls.
The fascinating untold story of Big Dairy, Big Government, and the war on unboiled milk.
Conservatives in 2008 are stuck in a monumental funk. Enter Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who have written a provocative new treatise on a way out of the morass.
High Noon is routinely listed as one of the top American movies of all time. And it is almost universally acclaimed as one of the top three Westerns, if not the best Western ever made. With its transcendent themes of courage and honor, it appeals to people of vastly different political colors for different reasons.
Does the ultimate chick show have anything for a man?
From escort to White House correspondent, the self-styled “Voice of the New Media” abides. (From the print edition.)
Move over Austria and Chicago. George Mason University makes economics interesting.
The Beltway’s best and brightest never stop working — and never take credit.
Reason science reporter Ron Bailey’s recent conversion on global warming has other libertarians all fired up.
Reckoning with ten years of life lived in the shadow of the world’s biggest — and most elusive — indie rockers.
The Joe Trippi of the Right.
Everyone agreed it was a great party until Jesus arrived.
One woman’s quest for flesh.
Everything is half as dangerous as it’s supposed to be.
Why racism is still alive, and how conservatives can deal with it.
Why asking a favor is better than doing one.
Libertarian politics and funky grooves.
Why the hell would a libertarian move to Sweden?
Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters used to mud-wrestle for this type of interview, back when the plum assignment was Mother Teresa or Princess Diana or Jennifer Aniston or President-elect Hillary Clinton. Men never get these gigs.
Despite his protests to the contrary, the legendary scientist was a believer — not in God, but in little green men.
What does copyright mean in a YouTube world? And who gets to decide?
Baylen Linnekin tastes the forbidden food and investigates why it’s so controversial.
Everyone who advocates sex education is advocating the imposition of a set of values, but only conservatives seem to realize it. In fact, they’re quite up front about it, while liberals tend to believe in some imaginary demarcation between ethics and policy that exists only in their heads.
Jeremy Lott’s unlikely path to political journalism.
For three days after he was fired, Francis sat in the living room, despondent, watching TV. Then he started playing the game.
The sketchy, scary business of bringing the fun to little Jackson’s birthday party.
Adaptation, the process of turning source material—most often a novel—into a movie, has been around almost as long as the movies have. What does an adaptation owe to its source material?
If everyone is normal, everyone is boring.
The two-dimensional world of Thomas Friedman.
Megan McArdle: From unemployed B-school grad to blogger to professional journalist.
That was Jicky Adler. She took off her specs, as the actors stepped off the stage, and let the black frames hang from the antique old lady-like emerald-studded chain around her neck. Accessorizing was her way of establishing an image of authority.
Sam Francis was written out of the conservative movement. Was he nothing more than a racist?
Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships but Carrie Bradshaw has launched a thousand book proposals. Ever since Candace Bushnell’s novel Sex and the City became a hit TV series for HBO, the bed-hopping single played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in her famous Manolo Blahniks, has become a cultural shorthand for life after the Sexual Revolution.
I try not to be Captain Killjoy, and when it comes to fetishes I think most people expect some sort of liberating, feel-good-about-yourselves-despite-your-guilty-thoughts ethos from a sex columnist. But I can’t help you there, except to say if you feel uncomfortable about your sexual tics, trust me, there are people more messed up than you.
Economic populism is hardly new. First emerging amidst the collapse of America’s agricultural market during the 1870s, its proponents pushed for collective action among individual farmers to raise the price of agricultural products. That crusade soon resulted in a political movement that achieved widespread popularity, and the Populist party was born.
If ever you find yourself in an ambulance going to Borough hospital, you should open the back doors and jump out. A guy once said that to Kevin.
TCSDaily editor Nick Schulz buys out his employer.
What if I told you there was a surefire way to find excitement outside your relationship that doesn’t involve any difficult confrontations or soul-searching?
Anthony Bourdain, the offal-y good chef, author, and food-travel television host, may be the purest pop-culture expression of libertarianism today.
Our president is no Wilsonian. Now if only he knew that.
It may be that no other college or university can claim as eccentric and balkanized a conservative subculture as Yale’s. A major reason has to do with the Yale Political Union and the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr.
Three years ago, Penguin Books lured Bernadette from Regnery, an exclusively conservative publishing house in Washington, D.C., to work in New York City as an editor for its Sentinel imprint.
Malie knew a lot of people didn’t like to fly and boozed themselves to make the passage less frightening. She herself didn’t mind a little something just to relax. But this guy reeked. Salesman, probably.
The original, unedited version of Sean Higgins’ article on the Modern Drunkard convention.
I remember just before graduation, at a cocktail party, the college president’s wife politely inquired about my plans. I said I wanted to go into journalism or some other kind of editorial work. “Do you have a network for that?” she asked. “Kind of,” I said, “I call them friends.”
It doesn’t take much thought to realize that without some reasonable guidelines, sex is a moral minefield as destructive as anything in the human condition.
While no doubt some community affairs programs will have redeeming social value, it can’t be overlooked that public access often amounts to little more than a kind of old-school blogging. Sure, everyone is empowered to speak. But how many blogs are worth reading?
If there is a Modern Drunkard philosophy it is this: All of mankind would be better off with everyone getting their drunk on.
“I know plenty of people who I wouldn’t ever give away who are actually conservatives but who live in deathly fear, so they’re in the closet. It’s amazing. It’s really astounding. I say, ‘How can you survive?’”
The continuation of the Mark Helprin interview.
“Richard Gere will never be found. Neither will Terence Malick. Christina Aguilera, identified by her teeth. Haley Joel Osment. Samuel L. Jackson. Quentin Tarantino, jiggling on a stretcher so soaked with blood that it looked black as they loaded his body into an open ambulance.”
“You come to L.A., and no one seems to be working. Everyone is sitting around in cafes or at the coffee shop in the middle of the day . . . . You think it’s that easy. But of course, it’s not.”
Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi’s unabashed support for the actions of religious fascists ought to have signaled to even the most credulous of admissions officers that he was unfit.
It’s no longer particularly acceptable to brag about one’s church attendance or volunteer details of one’s own genealogy or pedigree, but a blow-by-blow account of the short life of an ear of organic, local sweet corn is appropriate conversation for dinner and a credit to any cook.
Why is everyone so afraid of melodrama, when it happens to be true? Those old melodramatic plots had to come from somewhere.
Stephen King is much more of a craftsman than he is usually given credit for, and his books are always entertaining. Cell goes off track, however, when the author pauses for political statement.
I know Brokeback was supposed to be a breakthrough gay love story, but the message I got from it was this: One bad gay-sex decision can ruin your life.
“I have a soft touch, but it rarely comes out in my columns,” says Ramesh Ponnuru.
The second new economy–the economy of genes–will change us forever. And it means, inevitably, that the meaning of capitalism will be changed forever.
David Brooks is among the few right-wingers with a well-developed sense of humor and an appreciation for popular culture. He is an antidote to all the conservatives who thunder about decadence as if Scarsdale was Sodom, and whose pessimism is so ingrained they can’t acknowledge that some things, somewhere, are getting better.
Men run to porn to avoid the heavy work of dealing with women. But this means that they engage in less meaningful relationships and end up feeding the beast of their loneliness.
‘Unlike Jerry Falwell and the others, I don’t think I’m the only source of wisdom out there,’ says Reverend Barry Lynn. ‘I don’t think it’s my obligation to pop off about my religious views.’
An answer to the old question, Can you worship Ayn Rand and God at the same time?
Muriel Spark wishes, I think, nothing less for her readers than to leave them off kilter.
“All of them were jockeying for position. In most cases, the position was sexual. In other cases, the position was professional. In still others, it was both.”
Ilya Shapiro’s big ambition is to go to Iraq as a military lawyer.
Screenwriters and producers come from the professional classes. Once they started making shows about their own kind, Archie Bunker and the working class got booted from prime time, never to return.
Fifty years ago, nearly one in three workers in the private sector carried a union card. But today barely 8 percent of the private sector is unionized. The movement is hobbled by a leadership which has stuck with tactics and slogans conceived when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president.
“Getting dressed passed my underwear is a new thing for me.”
See what else is in the new issue of Doublethink.
A Story of Illegal Immigration and the Cadillac of Christmas Trees
Kermit Roosevelt: Lawyer turned professor turned novelist
Did a Radical Feminist Write the Truly Tasteless Jokes Series?
In fact Rock the Vote is left wing, whether or not the young voters they claim to represent on a given issue are also left wing. In fact, as it is now demonstrating on Social Security, Rock the Vote is sufficiently liberal that it will campaign against young voters’ wishes to save and invest in personal accounts, if such wishes happen to conflict with reigning liberal doctrine.
This is the summer of our discontent. The American public is finally asking hard questions about President Bush’s stewardship of the Iraq war. Although voters share Bush’s vision of a democratic Iraq and agree with his warning that failure would be devastating, they are reexamining whether the president’s “stay the course” philosophy remains practical more [...]
The Cuban American vote is not inevitably Republican.
Are co-ed bathrooms on campus for real?
How straight edge swept punk rock.
The literature of mentoring.
How business bestsellers help impoverish our souls.
Bush v. Grandma: He doesn’t have a chance of reforming Social Security.
Nice Girl Fights Big-Government Conservatism
How I penetrated the movement and found out what was really going on.
The moderate Muslim speaks out.
And what they should keep in mind.
Pictures from the devastation.
To A.J. Liebling, people were more than characters.
What the next president will do in Iraq.
Greg Allen, artist and businessman.
We, the foolish editors of Doublethink, are inviting short story submissions. No, this is not a joke or, worse yet, a contest.
Now that it’s cool to get all political, I’m too old to really enjoy it.
Is this the year of political realignment?
General Order Number One forbids U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan from having any damn fun.
Internet dating services go political.
Used to be their party that stood up for the truly defenseless
They don’t do what they’re supposed to do.
On the writings of the late Michael Kelly, scourge of the Washington fat-head and war reporter par excellence
A serious look into what the heck is going on
Conservative playwright takes on American theater.
The key to President Bush’s reelection: independent voters.
Rolling Stone’s political coverage doesn’t rock, not even a little bit. With writers like Michael Moore, Stephen Glass - yes, that Stephen Glass - and Kevin Phillips, the magazine’s political coverage is increasingly lame and left-wing.
Short fiction appears to be in terminal decline. Most magazines shun it, or use it as marketing fodder to earn subscriptions. In the country that invented the short story, you now have to pay people to read it.
Virginia would seem to be a prime candidate for school-choice: It’s mostly Republican, is quite religious, and tends to support family-values public policies. So why does it fare so poorly at giving students and parents educational options?
Author Christopher Buckley on writing novels, handling Hollywood, and his latest effort, Florence of Arabia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s and John Lewis Gaddis’s latest books show what the Bush Administration gets right in its foreign policy.
An American conservative dodges punches from angry Swedes while setting up an alternative newspaper there.
Women in our enlightened time still need protection from men. Where do they get it?
