Books And Arts Articles
The Other Tom
The world's oldest 35-year-old remains in action.
Jun 26, 2017
So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts , I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it? If this were Twitter, I'd put up a poll. On the one hand, there's the fact that I have nothing to say about this movie except that it's dreadful, so maybe I should just give up. On the other ha Read more
Victory (?) at Sea
The Great War and modern naval conflict.
Jun 26, 2017
The Battle of Jutland reverberates powerfully in the history of naval combat, and it does so with a resonance that equals or exceeds that of such history-shaping sea struggles as Salamis in 480 b.c., Lepanto in 1571, Trafalgar in 1805, and Leyte Gulf in 1944. Now, in Jutland , Nicholas Jellicoe gives us a timely perspective on the events of May 31-June 1, 1916, in the North Sea—with copious detail and an opportunity to think about its present relevance. The happenings at Jutland were the epic Read more
Culture Clash
The slavery debate and our evolving Constitution.
Jun 26, 2017
Timothy S. Huebner has produced a valuable study of American constitutionalism, a study that could do enormous good if people read it. Gracefully written, it is also lengthy and scholarly, which means that readers must possess two qualities—patience and intellectual candor—to appreciate the magnitude of Huebner's achievement. Liberty and Union is remarkable for several reasons. It explores a wide range of themes in American history pertaining to the Civil War era, and it does so with a compr Read more
Crimson Tidings
The primordial color gets its due.
Jun 26, 2017
It is now hard to imagine, but before the mid-1960s most books, and not only on art historical subjects, appeared without a speck of color. It was not as if color printing technology was unavailable, but we had been conditioned by the circulation of millions of black-and-white photographic images, starting in the middle of the 19th century, to what the French historian Michel Pastoureau calls a "black-and-white reality." Cinema extended this domination into the mid-20th century. Who can imagine Read more
Cover Your Acts
What, precisely, is the key to congressional reform?
Jun 26, 2017
In DC Confidential , New York Law School professor David Schoenbrod describes how Congress degenerated from a responsible legislature, one that took responsibility for difficult decisions, to a body continually looking to dodge blame. The book is an absolute delight. Schoenbrod begins with an arresting story about, of all things, the federal Highway Trust fund. In 2014, the Fund was headed towards depletion, raising the prospect that federal highway construction would grind to a halt. No one wa Read more
Trails of the Jazz Age
F. Scott Fitzgerald, social critic?
Jun 26, 2017
Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb tells us, on the "historical rather than the literary imagination of its subject." (Brown is a professor of history.) If this strikes one as a curious approach—what do we care about in Fitzgerald exc Read more
Comic Critics
Ideologues drain all the wonder from a popcorn flick.
Jun 19, 2017
Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get into a big climactic fight with Ares, the Greek god of war. In bygone days, such a plot would not be the cause of extended analysis and study, and the movie that contains it would be treated as it dese Read more
Crosses to Bear
The limitations in the academic study of faith.
Jun 19, 2017
From its inception, Christianity has been known as the religion of the cross. Among Christians, the cross is a symbol of Christ's passion and its part in the economy of salvation. To non-Christians, it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal and a folly. How did a token of degradation inflicted largely on slaves, violent criminals, and insurgents evolve into the purest symbol of Christian faith? What transformed an emblem of vile death and suffering into an exalted object and a prompt to great mon Read more
Irresistible Force
Love in the shadow of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Jun 19, 2017
Dorit Rabinyan's latest novel chronicles nine months in the lives of Liat, an Israeli woman, and Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two young adults come separately to New York to study and to make their fortunes. When they meet in the autumn of 2002, they fall immediately in love. But it isn't long before problems between them arise. Ironically, it's the problems that drive the story line and keep the narrative from becoming just another romance novel. Growing up as an upper-middle-class Israeli, Read more
State of the City
There's no place quite like Singapore. But for how long?
Jun 19, 2017
Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world's most important cities are its location on one of the planet's most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures—British and overseas Chinese. There's no other place quite like Singapore, which goes back hundreds of years to a once-prosperous city called Temasek that essentially disappeared. Singapore's long colonial status started in 1819—when it was founded by Sir Stamford Ra Read more
Remember Malmedy
The truth, and untruth, of a German atrocity.
Jun 19, 2017
In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition. On December 17, 1944, as Hitler made his last stab in the Battle of the Bulge, 84 American soldiers were captured and slaughtered. The perpetrators were members of the 1st SS Panzer Division, a combat unit belonging to the Waffen SS, an especially vicious force integral to the Nazi campaign of genocide. Some 43 Americans c Read more
Let Them Eat Cake
Islands at sea unite over tea.
Jun 19, 2017
Cake is having a moment.In fact, it has been a long moment, a golden hour in the slow oven of history. With an audience of 14 million—more than half the Brits watching TV at the time— The Great British Bake Off , launched in 2010, is the most popular television program of recent years. Indeed, it has become Britain's equivalent of the Super Bowl: a mixing bowl in which competitors vie to whip up chocolate, orange, and cardamom ganache, or mounds of gold-painted physalis and crystallized rosebu Read more
First Among Equals
How George Washington became George Washington.
Jul 04, 2016
To see it, you need to ascend to the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wend your way to the northernmost corner. Here is the American art gallery. Slip through the long hall of bottles and vases, and past the earthy and sometimes gritty works of the Ashcan school. Stop in breathtaking ardor before John Singer Sargent's Madame X , then shuffle, goggle-eyed, past luminous mid-19th-century works by Francis William Edmonds and his ilk into Gallery 760. Then you can't miss it: Wash Read more
Market Rules
IP is the key to success, except when it isn't.
Jun 12, 2017
The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie's failure, in Hollywood's eyes, was simple: King Arthur was "very old IP." See, it wasn't fresh IP, like the upcoming Emoji Movie , which is about those little yellow graphics that began flooding your text messages in 2010. It wasn't IP from 30 y Read more
Separate and Unequal
A Northerner's excursion to the segregated South.
Jun 12, 2017
Ray Sprigle probably had no idea when he set out for the assignment of a lifetime that his journalism would become, to quote the overused clich , "the first rough draft of history." His 1948 series in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette —"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days"—shocked readers in western Pennsylvania. Through syndication in 14 other newspaper markets around the nation it sparked a lively debate, especially among some Southern editors who were appalled that a Yankee reporter, disguisi Read more
On to Atlantis!
The fictional version of a nonexistent world.
Jun 12, 2017
In 1882, a Minnesota writer and politician named Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World , perhaps the most popular work of pseudo-science of the 19th century. Its opening pages confidently set forth 13 propositions about the legendary island kingdom—notably that Atlantis was real, that it was an advanced civilization with colonies in ancient Egypt and South America, and that it invented the alphabet and writing, practiced monotheistic sun-worship, and possessed sophisticat Read more
Darkness at Noon
The interrupted journey of Weldon Kees.
Jun 12, 2017
When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review , Poetry , Harper's , and the New Yorker . But on July 19, 1955, his car was discovered near the Golden Gate Bridge. Although his body was never found—unless you believe the handful of people who claim to have seen him since—and he had told frie Read more
Sharing the Wealth
Charter schools succeed when they learn from other charter schools.
Jun 12, 2017
Expanding school choices for parents remains a heated debate, from states providing families vouchers for their children to attend private schools, to school boards creating magnet schools and other public alternatives, to states and districts granting charter schools freedom to innovate the way schools serve children. You may or may not like those choices, but they stem from a common and important instinct: give parents more options for their children, especially parents whose neighborhood scho Read more
Prodigy of Freedom
Thomas Jefferson, Virginian and American.
Jun 12, 2017
Most Americans have thought about Thomas Jefferson much as our first professional biographer, James Parton, did. "If Jefferson was wrong," wrote Parton in 1874, "America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right." Unfortunately, Jefferson at present looks to be more wrong than right, at least among most academic historians, and therefore America has become more wrong than right, especially on matters of race. As John B. Boles points out in this good, solid, generally fair-minded biograp Read more
Fathers in Chief
A revealing look at presidents as parents.
Jul 04, 2016
Vice President Henry Wallace once observed of his boss, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “He doesn't know any man and no man knows him. Even his own family doesn't know anything about him." It's not surprising that Wallace would think ill of a man who dumped him from the ticket while seeking a fourth term—a move that enabled Harry Truman, rather than Wallace, to ascend to the presidency. But given Roosevelt's relationship with his own children, Wallace's comment was probably a product of insight, not Read more
A Tar Heel Meteor
The pol at the dawn of North Carolina’s modern era
Jan 19, 2015
Some eight miles west by south of the central North Carolina town of my boyhood, one comes upon red-clay dairy country, furnished with lush pastures and comfortable houses. Hawfields, as the neighborhood is called, dates from colonial times: The route of Cornwallis’s fateful retirement toward Yorktown runs close by. It was the home of W. Kerr Scott, governor of North Carolina from 1949 to 1953 and U.S. senator from 1954 until his death in 1958. Among mid-20th-century Tar Heel politicians, Sco Read more
Uncompromised
An artist's vision for 'Twin Peaks: The Return.'
Jun 05, 2017
David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4 hours of the 18-hour series he has just cowritten and directed for Showtime— Twin Peaks: The Return —make that clear. There are scenes here, moments here, flashes here, alternately shocking and dazzlin Read more
Object Lessons
For Henri Matisse, the outward appearance reflects an inner life.
Jun 05, 2017
Boston To endow Emma Bovary with his feelings, Gustave Flaubert endowed objects with her feelings. When Rodolphe reneges on his promise to elope, Emma is prostrated by "brain fever." The trappings of sainthood substitute for erotic satisfaction: "She bought rosaries and wore holy medals. She wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every evening." "Take that table, for example," Henri Matisse (1869-1954) said to the American paint Read more
Rested and Ready?
The American engine could use a tune-up.
Jun 05, 2017
We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets. As change proceeds exponentially, our biggest problem may be adjusting to all the dynamism. That's one story. But Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and coauthor of the won Read more
Magic Lantern
It's been a century since we met J. Alfred Prufrock.
Jun 05, 2017
One of the quieter celebrations of a literary centennial may be the one for Prufrock and Other Observations , T. S. Eliot's first book of poems, published in 1917. Eliot was then 29 years of age and had published a number of poems, essays on philosophic topics, and reviews. Married to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, he and his wife experienced a rocky marriage, to say the least—both of them frequently ill with minor complaints, even as her psychological state grew increasingly disturbed. Eliot t Read more
A Soldier's Word
Harsh truths, and merciful lies, about war.
Jun 05, 2017
On January 26, 1945, this is what an American soldier in Belgium wrote home to his parents: I'm warm and comfortable now, and sitting here in front of a fire. And this is one of the times when I fall into sympathy with home. I don't think I ever realized or appreciated before how lucky I am. You know, the four of us make a grand family. There's nothing material we don't have that we could want. . . . I wish I could be aware of this when we're all together. I imagine you feel pretty much the Read more
Tigers at Bay
They're roaring, but for how long?
Jun 05, 2017
There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the shipping industry that carries them; it is both the European Union's and the United States' biggest trading partner. As a region, it is also more robust than either the EU or the United States, where the Read more
Room for Murder
Mayhem and mystery in Victorian Edinburgh.
Jul 04, 2016
The locked-room mystery was a favorite subcategory of detective stories in the early 20th century. By 1941, it seemed all possible variations on getting a murderer into or out of a room locked, sealed, barred, closely observed, or otherwise inaccessible, without resort to supernatural agencies, had been discovered, and Howard Haycraft, in his definitive history Murder for Pleasure , was warning newcomers not to attempt it: “Only a genius can invest it with novelty or interest to-day." Despite Read more
Designs for Living
On the architecture of (commercial) desire
Jan 19, 2015
When we look back on the late-19th/early-20th century and think of the technological changes that made life “modern,” we usually imagine the conquests of distance: telegraphs and telephones, trains and steamships, automobiles and airplanes. We don’t think about canned goods, cigarettes, soda pop, phonographs, or Kodak cameras. These things might have been new. They might have been ingenious. But they don’t strike us as especially world-shaking. In Packaged Pleasures , though, Gary S. Cross an Read more
The Hit Parade
Keanu Reeves and the economics of movie mayhem.
May 29, 2017
In the deceptively thoughtful 2014 action film John Wick , Keanu Reeves plays a recently widowed assassin who comes out of retirement after Russian gangsters beat him up, steal his car, and kill his dog. Miffed about the car, not too happy about the beating, but furious about the demise of his puppy, Wick goes on a murderous rampage and ends up killing 3,625 people, all of whom deserve it. Motion pictures often provide subtle, impossibly delicate critiques of society that go over the head of Read more