Barton Swaim
Barton Swaim is opinion editor of the Weekly Standard. In 2005 he received a doctorate in English from the University of Edinburgh; his thesis was published as Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere (Bucknell). From 2007 to 2010 he worked for South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford of as a speechwriter, an experience he wrote about in a memoir titled The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (Simon & Schuster). Since then he has been a contributing columnist for the Washington Post and currently writes on political books for the Wall Street Journal. Barton has also written frequently for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Criterion, and the Los Angeles Times.
Stories by Barton Swaim
The Expertocracy
What if they don't know as much as they think they do?
May 22, 2017
It's constantly surprising to me how promiscuously Americans use the term "expert." An expert is someone who has comprehensive knowledge of a subject or total mastery of a skill. We all recognize such people—the guy who repaired my roof last year is an expert, I think, because you can't perform the job better than he did. But the sheer variety of people termed "experts" today is enough to make you ponder the term's meaning. A quick Google News search suggests there are experts on pets, human rig Read more
Beyond the Cross
Myriad meanings in the death of Jesus.
May 23, 2016
It’s a commonplace observation, and yet somehow still a shocking one: In all of human civilization, no subject has been written and talked about more than the death of Jesus Christ. A typical subject you might study in graduate school—presidential politics, say, or the poetry of William Wordsworth—will occupy four or five shelves of a well-stocked university library. The death of Jesus generates that much material every decade and has done so for centuries. Many scholars and theologians, of co Read more
The Masculine Case
From the October 31, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
6:00 AM, Oct 26, 2016
Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions. First, offer to write book reviews instead of freestanding essays; second, once you've finished your piece, obsess over it for hours and hours. Make it as typographically flawless, structurally coherent, and altogether mellifluous as you can make it. What you want to do more than anything else, I say, is to make the editor happy, and the way to do that is to make the job of rea Read more
The Masculine Case
A writer's choice of pronouns tells us a lot about him.
2:00 AM, Oct 21, 2016
Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions. First, offer to write book reviews instead of freestanding essays; second, once you’ve finished your piece, obsess over it for hours and hours. Make it as typographically flawless, structurally coherent, and altogether mellifluous as you can make it. What you want to do more than anything else, I say, is to make the editor happy, and the way to do that is to make the job of rea Read more
Prufrock: Elegant British Losses, Shakespeare's Politics, Orwell on Wells and Hitler, and More
9:30 AM, Jun 18, 2016
Reviews and News: The British have an especially beautiful way of losing : "It was a long time before they were overcome – before we finished them. When we did get to them, they all died in one place, together. They threw down their guns when their ammunition was done, and then commenced with their pistols, which they used as long as their ammunition lasted; and then they formed a line, shoulder to shoulder and back to back, and fought with their knives." * * In the today's Wall Street Read more
Prufrock: Augustine's Conversion, America's Clubs, and a Sketchy Papyrus
9:30 AM, Jun 17, 2016
Reviews and News: In 2012, New Testament scholar Karen King presented a papyrus seeming to indicate that Jesus was married. "Jesus said to them, My wife," it says. The papyrus's authenticity was challenged almost immediately, however, and not merely by traditionalists. In The Atlantic , Ariel Sabar examines its chain of ownership, and what he finds does not inspire confidence in the document's authenticity. * * Robin Lane Fox's St. Augustine "doesn't convert to Christianity; he conve Read more
Philosopher and King
Richard Nixon and his Pat -- Moynihan, that is.
Jun 27, 2016
Newly elected presidents, their staffs flush with optimism and bursting with fresh ideas, sometimes invite a member of the opposing party, or at least an adherent of an opposing ideology, to join the administration. Maybe it’s a political gesture; maybe it's an expression of magnanimity or of confidence that what matters isn't ideology or party labels. In any case, it usually ends badly. I think of David Gergen going to work for Bill Clinton in 1993 or John J. DiIulio joining the Bush administ Read more
Prufrock: Primo Levi's works, the Higher Education Ponzi Scheme, Skywriting as Art, and Trouble at the Brontë Society
9:30 AM, Jun 16, 2016
Reviews and News: Penguin Classics has produced a three-volume collection of Primo Levi's works : "In the mid-1950s, Primo Levi often travelled to Germany on business as an industrial chemist. It would have been bad for business if he could not, at some level, accommodate the country that had degraded him as a Jew at Auschwitz. In his memoir of his survival in the camp, If This Is a Man (1947), the Germans are addressed aggressively in the vocative: 'You Germans, you have succeeded.' Any G Read more
Prufrock: Death and Social Media, Lionel Shriver's America, and Wallace Stevens' Reputation
9:30 AM, Jun 15, 2016
Reviews and News: Next time someone you know dies, please, don't put it on social media : "The morning after my sister Lauren died was cold and quiet, a mid-March prairie dawn, lit by gray half-light. For several hours I tried to figure out how to get out of bed. The most routine tasks are extraordinarily difficult in the early days of grief – Lauren's death had torn a hole in my universe, and I knew the moment I moved I would fall right through it. Meanwhile, across the city, a former clas Read more
Prufrock: Intelligence Enhancers, Mean Girls, and Britain's Least Glamorous Sport
9:30 AM, Jun 14, 2016
Reviews and News: Jeffrey M. Zacks explains the follies of quick-fix "intelligence-enhancers" and the value of doing the hard work of using your mind : "Is it just me, or is everybody out there looking for a quick fix? There is something highly compelling about the idea that there is a secret switch we can flip to become suddenly smarter, to reveal cognitive abilities hidden inside each of us. It is a notion that certainly has commercial appeal. Over just seven years, the games-maker Lumosi Read more
Prufrock: Limousine Liberals, the Impossibility of Political Satire, and the Hatred of Poetry
9:30 AM, Jun 13, 2016
Reviews and News: Fred Siegel on a new book about New York City politics in 1969 : "Roughly 15 years ago, I took part in a symposium on the political legacy of former New York City mayor John Lindsay. Little of note was said from the podium, but I couldn't help noticing that the former Lindsayites who spoke all had limousines waiting for them at the curb. It was a striking reminder of the epithets hurled at Lindsay during the 1969 mayoral election when his opponent, Mario Procaccino, mocked Read more
Prufrock: Modiano's obscurantism, the west's soft totalitarianism, and Nézet-Séguin's turtle tattoo
9:30 AM, Jun 11, 2016
Reviews and News: Dominic Green on 2014 Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano's deliberate obscurantism : "The typical Modiano novel begins with a mystery of origins and identity, and proceeds by passivity and vagueness. Sometimes, the story terminates in a tragedy of life foreshortened. Sometimes the track runs full circle, as though life is a series of improvisations, each designed to keep you where you are. Either way, the 'force of circumstances' determines the outcome." ** Michael Mande Read more
Prufrock: Cultural Intelligence, Americans' Drinking Habits, and 'Chuffah'
9:30 AM, Jun 10, 2016
Reviews and News: Arnold Kling on cultural intelligence : "Thanks to work in a number of related fields, collected in some exceptionally important books published in just the past few years, it is becoming increasingly apparent that progress tends to arise from the evolution of decentralized trial-and-error processes more than from grand schemes launched by planners and revolutionaries." * * What a great time for a book on Americans' drinking habits. * * A. Scott Berg's 1978 b Read more
Prufrock: Time Travel as Social Commentary, Fiction About Guilt, and Lord Byron's Secrets
9:30 AM, Jun 09, 2016
Reviews and News: Time travel as social commentary : "Allusions to the present are in ample supply in this Russian doll of a novel. The story unfolds in a familiar near future of big data and artificial intelligence. Its characters have drifted through an extended adolescence: moving back in with parents and working in dead-end jobs, with friendships organised and experienced through smartphones. Now they drift through adulthood in self-driving cars, blithely accepting prying governments an Read more
Losses and Wins
Bridging the generation gap with Ole Miss football.
Jan 11, 2016
Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s top political strategist during the 2012 campaign. He knows what it feels like to lose, and he can hardly talk about that loss with anyone who hasn't experienced a campaign from the inside: It was such an intense, pressured, chaotic process that demanded so much it was inevitable that one began and ended a different person. A year after the election, he writes, "there were still long periods when I'd lie in bed reading and trying, never very successfully, n Read more
Same Difference
A metaphor is like a—well, what, exactly?
Mar 16, 2015
There is something magical about saying a thing is something that it obviously is not. Children know this instinctively. Calling a shoebox a castle, or a pencil a scepter, can elicit momentary raptures of delight in a child: not primarily for the functional reason that it allows him to immerse himself in an imaginary story, and certainly not because he thinks the shoebox is a castle, or the pencil is a scepter, but chiefly because it’s a thrill to think of something in a different way by cal Read more
Take Your Medicine
This ‘prescriptive’ is a hard pill to swallow
Sep 01, 2014
In 2007, I went to work as a speechwriter in a political office. Although my boss didn’t care much for my writing, the rest of the staff considered me an authority on grammar and usage. I was the writer, they seemed to reason, so I must understand the deep magic of the English language. Nearly every day my phone would ring and someone would ask, “Is it ‘none is’ or ‘none are’?” or “Can you use ‘impact’ as a verb?” or “Do you capitalize ‘judicial branch’?” At first I tried to respond with nuan Read more
Infamous Creoles
Annals of the avant-garde in the Vieux Carré.
Jun 10, 2013
The great thing about this account of the artists and intellectuals in and around New Orleans’s French Quarter during the 1920s is that it upends nearly every assumption commonly made about the American South—even the true ones. The early-20th-century South may have produced the odd isolated genius, but it did not generate anything of cultural distinction. True enough. And yet for a decade, New Orleans—by far the largest city in the South with 400,000 people—became a hothouse of young, or mostly Read more
All in Good Time
The key to success is getting around to it, eventually.
Feb 04, 2013
Before reading it, I had already decided to dislike this book. I had assumed, incorrectly, that it must be another clever panegyric on something traditionally thought of as a vice. I’ve grown weary of volumes purporting to reveal the hidden virtues of (to recall a few works from the last decade or so) hypocrisy, bitchiness, gossip, divorce, and melancholy. At their best, these kinds of books can make us reexamine pejorative words and concepts—Adam Bellow’s In Defense of Nepotism did that for m Read more
Smart Writing
It’s good to be published, and better to be understood.
Sep 03, 2012
Modern academics are not celebrated for the clarity and felicity of their writing. One of the most important lessons a postgraduate student can learn—and if he doesn’t learn it soon, he’s doomed—is that academics generally do not write books and articles for the purpose of expressing their ideas as clearly as possible for the benefit of people who don’t already understand and agree with them. Academics don’t write to be read; they write to be published. Typically, the only people who actually re Read more
Scot on the Rocks
Why readers should rediscover Sir Walter Scott.
Oct 24, 2011
As recently as a century ago, Sir Walter Scott was known all over Europe and America. In life he had been the original literary celebrity, called “the Great Unknown” because his novels were published anonymously, although everybody knew their author’s identity. By the time of his death in 1832 his works were available in French, German, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Danish, Russian, and Hungarian. Scott was as influential as any writer of his age could be. Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Vict Read more
Eminent Victorian
It’s not easy reducing the phenomenon of Viscount Palmerston to words.
Sep 26, 2011
"David Brown’s multi-faceted Palmerston,” says a blurb on the back of this volume, “in its archival mastery, scope and insight, outdistances any other.” I thought I detected a note of ambiguity in that verb “outdistances,” and I was right. Brown knows everything it’s humanly possible to know about his subject, and he has documented that knowledge in well over 2,000 endnotes. But he has no gift for narrative, and the life of this extraordinary statesman often gets lost amid long explanations of c Read more
Puritan in Verse
The poet-politician of the English Civil War gets his due.
Apr 25, 2011
Andrew Marvell The Chameleon by Nigel Smith Yale, 416 pp., $45 When Andrew Marvell died in 1678, he wasn’t thought of as a great poet, or indeed a poet of any caliber at all. He was known as an industrious member of Parliament and as a talented pamphleteer—author, among other works, of The Rehearsal Transpros’d , a witheringly funny attack on the Erastian and anti-Puritan cleric Samuel Parker, and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England , a wor Read more
She’s the One
Jane Austen’s greatness is a truth universally acknowledged.
Jan 03, 2011
Jane’s Fame How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman Holt, 304 pp., $26 When Jane Austen died in July 1817, aged 41, she had achieved moderate fame as a writer. In the previous six years, four of her novels had been published . She had been the subject of a long and highly favorable review in one of the country’s most respected journals, the Quarterly Review , and the Prince Regent was said to be “a great admirer” of her works, keeping sets of her novels at Read more
God in the Details
Why disbelieving doesn’t always make it so.
Nov 22, 2010
Absence of Mind The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Marilynne Robinson Yale, 176 pp., $24 "In the matter of belief,” writes the Rev. John Ames, the narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s justly admired novel Gilead (2004), “I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about Read more
Oh the Profanity!
The use and abuse of words that pack a punch
11:00 PM, Oct 12, 2010
Recently I watched a 10-minute YouTube video purporting to be the “100 Greatest Movie Insults.” It’s a pretty diverse collection, though as you’d expect it favors American films from the 1980s and later. Some of the insults are mildly entertaining—Cher’s abuse of Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick (1985) is nicely done—but most consist of low, generally nonsensical vulgarity. You get Joe Pesci in Casino (1995) calling someone a “s—t-kicking, stinking, horse manure-smelling motherf— Read more
Memento Muriel
A writer of minor masterpieces
Sep 27, 2010
Muriel Spark The Biography by Martin Stannard Norton, 627 pp., $35 I like purple passages in my life. . . . But not in my writing. I think it’s bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional involvement on the reader—much nicer to make them laugh and to keep it short. So Muriel Spark once remarked to an interviewer. Her 22 novels are almost all short, some less than 40,000 words. Her fiction is crisp and laconic rather than imposing. But it’s not for that reason unserious; in Read more
Dr J.’s Sampler
Gleanings from the sage of Fleet Street
Jun 14, 2010
Samuel Johnson Selected Writings edited by Peter Martin Belknap Harvard, 536 pp., $29.95 Years ago I bought a musty, hundred-year-old book at a secondhand bookstore, Selected Essays of Samuel Johnson , edited by a scholar named Stuart Reid. I remember reading the book and thinking I would write an essay on why it’s too bad Burke, rather than Johnson, is thought to be the father of modern conservatism. I yield to no man in admiring Edmund Burke, but his conservatism seemed essentially a Read more
Tactical Exercise
The Civil War was a contest between two sets of West Pointers.
Apr 19, 2010
West Pointers and the Civil War The Old Army in War and Peace by Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh North Carolina, 304 pp., $30 I f we mean to play at war as we play a game of chess—West Point tactics prevailing—we are sure to lose the game. They have every advantage. They can lose pawns ad infinitum—to the end of time—and never feel it. So remarked Wade Hampton, a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia, in the bloody summer of 1862. Hampton was one of the war’s few imp Read more