Rauschenberg is a bore

Pity the security guard at the Guggenheim who must patrol the gallery in which Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped is installed. Mounted in commemoration of the artist’s centennial – Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in October 1925 – Life Can’t Be Stopped includes “Revolver II” (1967), a set of plexiglass discs with images overlaid. A cord leads from the back of this contraption to a pedestal on which there is a control panel – a set of buttons placed in proximity to the viewer. These switches set the plexiglass discs in motion, and they beg to be pushed. On my trip to the museum, visitor after visitor was shushed away from “Revolver II” with the age-old plaint: “Please don’t touch the art.” We were informed that a designated button-pusher would do the honors at unscheduled times during the day. What fun is that?

That dour, party-pooping spirit pervades this 100th birthday fête. The Guggenheim extols Rauschenberg as a figure “whose influence on contemporary art remains immeasurable.” Maybe so, but what good has that influence been?

As part of the festivities, a one-night event included performances by the dance companies of Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor, choreographers for whom Rauschenberg provided stage settings. For Taylor, Rauschenberg created “Tracer” (1962), a spinning bicycle wheel here accompanied by music by James Tenney. “Tracer” is an obvious homage to “Bicycle Wheel “(1916-17), a ready-made object by the grandpère of anti-art, Marcel Duchamp.

Rauschenberg’s oeuvre is inconceivable without the example set by Duchamp, a cigar-smoking gadfly whose specialty was upsetting the preconceptions of a cultural elite that he was very much a part of. The irony is that the dadaist kingpin had an eye sharp enough to realize that he possessed neither the imagination nor the gumption to compete with such contemporaries as Brâncuşi, Matisse and Picasso. The Duchampian corpus is small: he spent much of his life playing chess. Rauschenberg does not possess any similarly redeeming self-awareness. Duchamp lived to see a younger generation take inspiration from a mode of artmaking specifically contrived to undermine it. Did he take pride in his progeny? Hardly: Duchamp was skeptical of their efforts. Neo-dadaists, he averred, were taking “an easy way out.” He had thrown a bicycle wheel and a urinal into the establishment’s face “as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

Nose-thumbing is irresistible and can be profitable in an art market that often mistakes provocation for aesthetic worth. Every time a stray wit duct-tapes a banana to a wall and calls it art (see “Comedian” by Maurizio Catellan), a line can be traced to Duchamp. Before it reaches Duchamp, however, that line would run through Rauschenberg, the man who made anti-art safe for mass consumption. Dada with a smiley face – Bob’s our man.

The die was cast in 1953, when Rauschenberg the precocious Texan erased a drawing by the painter Willem de Kooning and appropriated it as his own work, to wit: “Erased de Kooning Drawing.” A Duchampian stunt of the first order, you might think, but the gesture was not altogether nihilistic. Duchamp’s cynicism had a certain integrity; he pulled from European intellectual debates. Rauschenberg, in contrast, was as American as apple pie.

Rauschenberg’s earliest and best work is marked by a can-do positivity, a kind of free-for-all optimism that became increasingly codified as success while his small talent transformed into an international industry. The young Rauschenberg is in scant evidence at the Guggenheim, though pieces such as “Untitled (Red Painting)” (c. 1953) and “Untitled (Hotel Bilbao)” (c. 1952) evince a rough-hewn approach to materials gleaned from the German collage artist Kurt Schwitters. A sense of play and, at moments, a sort of tenderness is palpable.

Rauschenberg’s initial efforts at drawings made with solvent transfer – a process whereby printed materials are applied to a surface by soaking them with water and chemicals – were similarly endowed with a promiscuous curiosity and scope. But once he got a handle on this method, it became considerably less winning. Rauschenberg coasted on its second-hand appeal, submitting a surfeit of grainy news photos to grid-like superstructures and then punctuating them with brushwork mimicking the rough-and-tumble verities of abstract expressionism. “Expert,” this kind of thing is called again and again; over the long haul, it is deadening.

The centerpiece of Life Can’t Be Stopped is “Barge” (1962-63), a black-and-white canvas that measures five feet high by a whopping 32 feet in width. Completed in a 24-hour period, this piece found Rauschenberg adopting a commercial printing technique introduced to him by Andy Warhol. Time isn’t necessarily an indicator of aesthetic worth – better works have been made in fewer hours – but taking advice from Warhol only brought out the worst in Rauschenberg. Tactility and enthusiasm were subsequently sacrificed for efficiency. The resultant diminution of material and aesthetic necessity is fatal.

As it is, “Barge” is a glibly articulated compendium of diagrams, football-game footage, photos of space vehicles and – should these items not be arbitrary enough – a reproduction of “Venus at Her Mirror” by Diego Velázquez. “This monumental piece,” the Guggenheim tells us, “makes its highly anticipated return to New York for the first time in nearly 25 years.”

Public-relations hyperbole is one thing, but it’s doubtful that a work as dead-on-arrival as “Barge” is capable of prompting a response from even the most ardent Rauschenberg fan. There are better ways to celebrate a birthday than Life Can’t Be Stopped.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Man Ray is alluring in the way a psychopath is

Down to his chosen name, Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) worked hard to squash anything about him you might call human. At least that’s what is suggested by the Met’s exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream. The show spans much of his career – he was associated with surrealism and dada, held a day job as a commercial photographer and experimented with almost every medium imaginable – but coheres around his so-called rayographs, also known, in less egotistical fashion, as photograms.

Many will know this medium from elementary school: place objects on top of a light-sensitive sheet and expose them to light to yield white silhouettes against a dark background. These and the other works on view are weird and alluring in the way that a sleek, beautiful sociopath is.

The show floats around the artist’s career from about the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, by which time he had achieved avant-garde stardom. We find mechanistic, brutish paintings of color planes; airbrushed canvases with all the technical shortcomings of a Magritte and little of the charm; cliché-verres of spindly, dancing lines; “primitive” sculptures; a slick chess board; and much more. A mobile of cascading clothes hangers casts a rotating, crystalline shadow on the floor. A pair of 1918-20 photographs titled “L’homme” and “La femme” – an eggbeater and an assemblage including two side-by-side reflectors, respectively – are chuckle-worthy in their anatomical punning but slightly sinister, not least because Man Ray at one point switched their titles. There’s a void at the heart of these works. It’s not that the artist is trying to conceal the artist’s hand; it’s that whatever hand is there isn’t quite human.

The central room holds most of the rayographs, rectangles of rich black hues hung on black walls. The white negative space takes the shape of combs, cones, eggs, nails, the cubic limits of crystal prisms, even two ghostly banjos, fuzzy with translucent drums and rings of reflective chrome. Also displayed here is one of the exhibition’s several films: “Le retour à la raison” (1923), a scattershot series of reverse silhouettes. Most of the reel was developed using the same method as the rayographs, but the images are interspersed with shots including a headless woman’s nude torso. The film reveals that the pictures sometimes work better when they flash by quickly rather than when they linger. What’s striking about the rayographs is that they look as if they were made by someone who doesn’t quite know what household objects are used for – or who wants to make everyone else forget. Q-tips, matches, a wing bolt attached to a screw – we can no longer recognize them by their utility, let alone imagine picking them up. Each object is hollowed of its purpose; only outline remains. As each object’s human ends are washed away, so too is its essence.

The exhibition’s insight is in linking the rayographs to the other realms of Man Ray’s oeuvre: the curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson, make clear that this was all conceived by the same mind. Exit the rayograph galleries and take a look at the infamous “Cadeau” (1921), a flatiron with a cruel line of tacks glued to its face. Initially, you may see glimmers of humor, play or strange magic. But those soon fade, leaving only the cold glint of alienation. It’s no comfort to read André Breton, the author of the first Surrealist Manifesto, writing that Man Ray treated his human subjects just like his nonhuman ones: “How astonished they would be if I told them they are participants for exactly the same reasons as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar-frost or fern!”

Though Breton’s writings recur throughout the show, Man Ray never officially joined the surrealists’ ranks. He also dipped in and out of dada, the iconoclastic movement whose founder, Tristan Tzara, lavished the rayographs with praise, providing the title for the exhibition. The catalog cites Man Ray’s “aversion to anything ‘beyond the control of one man,’ meaning himself.” This could just as well explain the artist’s attempt to treat his human subjects as virtually inanimate. What’s beyond the control of one man if not another man?

Despite refusing to carry any membership cards, however, Man Ray did photograph the surrealists’ “sleeping fits,” induced trances during which they documented the visions that came to them. He later said of the sessions, in which he declined to participate, “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.” The question hangs in the air: what’s the difference? We record our dreams to refer back to them, with the aim to understand the waking world as much as the sleeping one. But to realize a dream is to form the waking world in its mold. If these works are what Man Ray’s dreams look like, that’s not so innocent a wish.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day.

The robbery was initially dubbed the “heist of the century,” a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. There were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies.

But soon details emerged that suggested the gang of four weren’t quite of the caliber of the thieves immortalized in the Hollywood movie Ocean’s Eleven. They left behind a trail of clues: the two disc cutters used to open the display cabinets, a blowtorch, gloves, a walkie-talkie, a yellow vest, a blanket and the truck with extendable ladder. In their haste to escape, the thieves dropped Empress Eugénie’s crown, festooned with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds. In total, explained Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, the police found “more than 150 DNA, fingerprint and other traces” at the scene.

Within a week two men were in custody, who swiftly admitted “partial” responsibility; for their role in the heist. A third was arrested a few days later. All were petty criminals from the Paris suburbs. “It is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” said Beccuau.

One of the suspects is allegedly a former YouTube star famous for his motorbike stunts that he showed off on social media. According to media reports, his real name is Abdoulaye N, a 39-year-old with a rap sheet for petty crime stretching back two decades. Friends and associates claim that since he became a father he had settled down, and one told the New York Times: “He’s really the last guy I would have thought of for something like that.”

One of the three men in custody – not identified – was described at the weekend as a “good Samaritan.” Apparently he once came to the aid of a stranded motorist on the Paris ring road in September, offering a “calm and reassuring” presence to the distressed driver.

The fourth member of the gang has not been caught. Is he the one with the brains, as well as the booty? The thieves certainly knew what they were after. Rayan Ferrarotto, the commercial director of the French diamond merchant Celinni, says the jewels were stolen to order. “When you look at major art thefts, it is almost always the case that private collectors or enthusiasts commission the thefts to own a unique piece… it’s all about prestige and exclusivity.”

Beccuau says she is keeping an open mind about the theft. “We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewellery… it could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade; all leads are being explored.”

Is one possibility that getting caught quickly was part of the thieves’ plan? It subsequently emerged that the truck used in the robbery was stolen nine days earlier by two men who threatened the driver. Furthermore, that incident took place in Louvres, a town north-east of Paris. Perhaps the thieves had a good sense of humor. Or did they want to draw attention to themselves?

Knowing they had left behind so much incriminating evidence, why didn’t they flee France immediately instead of returning to their stamping ground in the suburbs of Paris?

Unless their bungling was all part of the plan. The maximum sentence in France for theft without violence is three years in prison and a €45,000 fine. In the case of aggravating circumstances, such as a gang robbery, the maximum sentence is five years in prison and a €75,000 fine. This increases to seven years when the theft involves “cultural property that is part of the public domain.”

With good behavior, and a willingness to “demonstrate efforts towards reintegration,” a prisoner can have six months per full year of incarceration reduced. In other words, even with a seven-year sentence, a well-behaved prisoner would be released after half that time.

In 2009, an armored cash van and its driver disappeared as it made a drop at a bank in Lyon. Initially it was feared the vehicle and its €11.6 million in deposit boxes had been hijacked. Eleven days later the driver, Tony Musulin, gave himself up and police retrieved €9 million of the money. Unfortunately, he said, €2.5 million had been stolen from him. He was sentenced to three years in prison. The missing money has never been found. In 2019, Musulin was briefly arrested in London when he tried to convert £75,000 into Euros at a bureau de change. He was released without charge after explaining that the money came from the sale of his Ferrari.

Musulin became something of a cult hero in France. Mugs and T-shirts were sold online emblazoned with “Tony Musulin, Best Driver 2009.” The Louvre thieves have also been feted in some quarters; a German company has used the robbery to promote its trucks with extendable ladders, telling customers they’re perfect for “when you need to move fast.”

Are the alleged perpetrators of the Louvre heist happy to go to prison for a few years knowing that when they get out they’ll get some of the proceeds? Or perhaps they are just opportunistic thieves who got lucky because the Louvre security was even more amateur than they were.

Is Martin Scorsese America’s greatest living director?

Who’s the greatest living American film director? Many would say Steven Spielberg, and that can’t be dismissed, but he hasn’t made a really good film since Munich (2005). There are many younger pretenders – such as David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino – and the more esoterically inclined might make the case for anyone from Terrence Malick to Spike Lee. Yet it’s hard not to feel that the don of contemporary American cinema is Martin Scorsese, whose career over the past five-and-a-half decades has existed, sans pareil, thanks to a vast dollop of talent, a considerable degree of good fortune and, crucially, an ability to lure both A-list collaborators and deep-pocketed moneymen into financing his films.

Many of these A-list collaborators are on display in Rebecca Miller’s new five-part Apple TV documentary Mr. Scorsese, a comprehensive, if slightly safe, show that is the most laudatory single-director profile since Susan Lacy’s Spielberg (2017). Many of the same collaborators pop up here: the starry likes of Spielberg himself, Cate Blanchett, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brian De Palma and Daniel Day-Lewis (Miller’s husband) are on hand in both instances to gush as to the excellence of that director. (Scorsese, naturally, was equally warm in Spielberg.)

Yet the two filmmakers could hardly be more different. One is a Jewish-American optimist from Ohio whose primarily heartwarming pictures – even the darker ones – focus on the virtues of kindness, personal decency and the nuclear family. For Scorsese, meanwhile, a fast-talking Italian-American from New York, the idea of “the family” is largely wrapped up with loyalty to a particular code, whether it’s criminal, spiritual or social. This has resulted in some of the very finest American pictures of the last five decades, whether it’s his earlier work with Robert De Niro –Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and Raging Bull – his more recent collaborations with DiCaprio such as The Wolf of Wall Street, The Departed and Killers of the Flower Moon, or some of the most fascinating examinations of religious faith on screen, not least Silence, Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ.

Scorsese, now 82 and in the final act of what has been a truly remarkable career, is unafraid to be filmed in an occasionally vulnerable light, looking conspicuously aged (although not frail) and puffing on an inhaler. The motormouth may still be functioning at high speed, but at 80 miles an hour, rather than the previous 120. (There are rumors of a new film, but nothing concrete.)

Miller is clearly impressed by her articulate and brilliant subject, but it would not have hurt to have had a little more rigor at times: while it is hard to think of a single Scorsese film that is bad, per se, there is a real case for examining what, for instance, possessed him to spend nearly $200 million of a studio’s money on the charming but ephemeral children’s picture Hugo, made in 3D when that format was briefly popular.

Still, the stories that are included are well worth five hours of anyone’s time. It’s commonly known that the levels of bloodshed in Taxi Driver gave the Motion Picture Association sleepless nights, but it was a revelation to discover that a distraught Scorsese wished to steal the print away from the concerned studio, possibly with the aid of a firearm, just as it’s amusing to hear Spielberg recount how his friend kept saying, “They want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut the guy who loses his hand.” Marty was, of course, right to stick to his guns.

There are many strands of the Scorsese saga that are barely touched on here but which remain intriguing. He came up in the New Hollywood era of such young, daring filmmakers as De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, but he and Spielberg alone continue to attract vast budgets and appreciative audiences in the decidedly dumbed-down new era of cinema that we currently inhabit. This is testament both to his ability to work well with actors – 24 Oscar nominations or wins for his pictures – and his reputation for producing serious yet accessible work.

Nor is he afraid to rattle cages. His remarks on superhero movies – “they’re not cinema… [they’re] theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” – outraged bean-counters and internet fanboys alike. But he had hit upon a vital truth, namely that these mass-market pictures – most of which are underperforming financially these days – are not serious intellectual nourishment but grossly ephemeral fast food for the brain.

I doubt that Mr. Scorsese, or its subject, will ever meet the same fate. Miller is sufficiently humble and savvy enough not to impose herself on the narrative that she has constructed, which is, justifiably, a celebration of the director. Earlier this year, many of us laughed at his self-deprecating cameo in The Studio. He’s one of the few working directors who’s recognizable enough for such an appearance to land. As we watch Mr. Scorsese, the question lingers at the back of our minds as to whether the series is a celebration of the director or a premature eulogy. Let’s hope it’s the former.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

A new Phantom comes to Broadway

Around midway through Masquerade – the new immersive adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, which sees a small audience whirled through a labyrinth of rooms and sets – I feel a hand on my shoulder. Smiling, I turn, expecting to see my friend – and immediately recoil.

A tiny circus freak grins at me, revealing teeth like sharpened screwdrivers and a painted face lifted straight from Día de los Muertos. Later, in a carnival scene, that same freak hammers three nails into her face and an ice-pick up her nose.

The carnival sequence is not in the original Phantom. It is one of the largest and perhaps most important of Masquerade’s additions. In it, we see the Phantom’s origin story: a young, malformed man is locked in a cage; a burlap sack is tied over his head, to be gawked at by paying customers. He is rendered literally faceless.

When his keeper lets him out to remove the sack and do the big “reveal” to the crowds, he escapes. We follow him, scrabbling away from his weeping owner (“he was like a son to me!”), to the Paris Opera. There, he hides away in the bowels of the building – a loner, until he becomes infatuated with the chorus girl Christine.

The episode elicits sympathy and explains the Phantom’s destructive behavior. He is, after all, a killer, stalker and kidnapper. Most importantly, it makes Masquerade squarely the Phantom’s show: he is misunderstood, rather than evil.

The Phantom of the Opera closed on Broadway in 2023 after a 35-year run. Diane Paulus, creator and director of Masquerade, attempts to fill the void with a giant exercise in fan-fiction that cleverly submerges the audience into the story – sometimes as flies on the wall, sometimes as actual players. It’s fabulous, fun and fantastically extravagant.

Set across six stories of an empty19th-century building in New York City, the experience is spiritually akin to Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, but rather than being a “choose your own adventure,” the plot is already laid out, and the audience – who are also masked and must wear black, silver or white formal attire – is tightly guided from room to room.

Everything is done on a grand scale: we dash up and down escalators, in and out of rooms, past artworks and scenery that we barely have time to take in. But, despite its sheer scope and magnitude, Masquerade succeeds because it feels so intimate. We’re here with Christine as she prepares for a performance in her small, cramped dressing room. We can reach out to touch the Phantom in his cage. We are underneath the chandelier before it crashes to the floor. “I’m glad you made it!” one of the side characters tells me, his hand fleetingly on my shoulder and his eyes locked on mine for just a second before he runs past.

Nowhere is this intimacy more apparent, though, then when it comes to the theme of lust. Our Christine, the young innocent who attracts the destructive forces of the night, is both intellectually and socially revolted by her suitor even as she finds herself irresistibly drawn to him and sexually awakened by his presence.

Paulus turns up these motifs of repressed desires to the max – not least in a scene where we creep up on Christine in bed. As she sleeps in a virginal, white – and very wispy – nightgown, the Phantom’s hand appears from behind to caress her. She arches her back and parts her lips. It’s embarrassingly sensual, casting us as the voyeurs. The Phantom may be ugly compared to Christine’s handsome but bland suitor, Raoul. But the Phantom offers her sex, danger and a voice.

Song, of course, matters in a musical and although the instrumentals in Masquerade are prerecorded (there’s no space for an orchestra on the move), the cast’s voices are big and their performances heartfelt, if at times mawkishly sentimental. When I visited, the very youthful and very talented Anna Zavelson played Christine as beguilingly naive and wide-eyed, opposite the always-convincing and often-debonair Jeff Kready as the Phantom.

It was only when we were spat out into an ornate gothic-styled cocktail bar at the end of the show that I saw the hundreds of other people who had attended the same night as me – and realized they had been in the building with us the whole time. (“Where did they all come from?” my companion asked).

In fact, audiences of 60 people at a time enter the building 15 minutes apart, with six Phantoms and Christines, and three Raouls, performing for six separate groups (many of the other actors rotate their roles between all six performances). That we never overlap, even during moments of transition, is extraordinary.

And yet the most moving scenes for me came when we shed the elaborate sets and climbed outside into the chilly fall air on the building’s roof. There, among the skyscrapers and office buildings of Manhattan, we hear Christine and Raoul sing a love song to each other. Later, Christine aches for her dead father as a lone violinist disappears into a mausoleum in the sky. It is a moment that asks us to use our imaginations and to lean in – to the romance, to the melodrama, to the grief, to the histrionics and, yes, to the silliness. In a maximalist show, full of pizazz and ambition, we could finally take a breath.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub – I mean, bar – and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

Still believes in democracy and – bless his heart – due process. Reads the Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

The War Room (The groupchat)

Where all decisions are made – or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

How Trader Joe’s became a way of life

A young woman recently approached me as I stood outside Trader Joe’s on the corner of 93rd Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m visiting from the UK and I’m just wondering if there’s anything worth seeing around here.”

This is not an unusual occurrence. It’s always tourist season in New York. People come for the cherry blossoms in Central Park, for the magic of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and for the vague hope of running into Timothée Chalamet at a downtown brunch place. They even come in the sweltering heat of summer when I, personally, would rather be anywhere else – ideally somewhere without the pungent smell of hot garbage and misplaced ambition.

But what struck me that morning was where this particular encounter took place. The Upper West Side, while perfectly charming in a “has a Duane Reade and emotional stability” kind of way, is not exactly a destination. It’s residential, practical, adult. The public schools are fine. It’s where you move, if you can afford it, once you’ve given up on pretending to enjoy warehouse parties in Bushwick. Sure, the American Museum of Natural History is nearby, but I doubted that a fossil collection and a beautifully preserved taxidermy otter were what this young woman was after.

“What brings you to this neighborhood?” I asked politely. She smiled, then lifted the object of her pilgrimage: a crisp new Trader Joe’s tote bag, price tag still attached, logo blazing red and proud. “Everyone back home wants one,” she said.

Let me back up. For the uninitiated, Trader Joe’s, despite what I naively believed when I first moved to New York in 2020, is not merely a grocery store. It’s a way of life. It’s a belief system. It’s a kind of secular religion with frozen orange chicken as communion. New Yorkers generally fall into two camps: those who speak reverently of the $3.49 pork and ginger soup dumplings that have “literally changed their lives” and those who – actually, I have no idea what the second group eats. Probably sadness. And maybe overpriced soup from Whole Foods.

I’ve long since made peace with the zealotry of local devotees. I’m also not saying I don’t belong to that class of converts. I can neither confirm nor deny that I’ve turned misty-eyed over the return of the butternut squash ravioli. I’ve been more than a spectator in full-blown theological debates over which seasonal candle – or which thick and chunky salsa – is the best.

There are Facebook groups, with membership numbers exceeding the populations of small nations, in which people exchange freezer-hack recipes as though decoding scripture. I know someone who once stood in line for 40 minutes because they had a premonition that the “everything but the bagel” seasoning might sell out. That’s not shopping; it’s prophecy.But what’s new – and frankly a little alarming even for me – is the globalization of this devotion. The Trader Joe’s tote bag has escaped its natural habitat. It’s gone international. I’ve heard it’s being slung over shoulders in Paris, Milan and Tokyo – worn not as a grocery accessory but as a cultural artifact, like an Andy Warhol print… but you can fill it with pre-washed broccoli florets. I saw one in London’s Knightsbridge this summer. And now I was standing opposite a young woman of maybe 20 who should’ve been taking a selfie in the line for lunch at Balthazar or flirting with a dreamy barista in the East Village, but who was instead basking in the smug glow of having scored the ultimate token of nouveau Americana.

Dwelling on all of this, I’ve decided I’ve just got to hand it to the California brand that, for all of its countercultural charm, is actually owned by the multinational discount supermarket Aldi. (Womp, womp.) Trader Joe’s has perfected the art of marketing faux frugality: a corporate giant clad in a Hawaiian shirt and the illusion of moral superiority. It’s capitalism’s coziest costume. Only Trader Joe’s could sell you an aesthetic of thrift while quietly printing money off seasonal hummus.

What really amazes me, though, is the reach of all this. Somehow, a brand with just over 600 stores – and not a single one outside of the United States – has managed to convince people who’ve never set foot in its aisles that its tote bag is the global badge of insider cool. The bag doesn’t just hold groceries, it holds belonging.

Now, sure, you could call this a pathetic indictment of the human condition and further evidence that consumerism is alive and well, but I take a different view. I’m impressed. In a world of tech companies harvesting our data and pharmaceutical companies leveraging our insecurities for profit, Trader Joe’s has managed to build an empire out of whimsy and frozen fish sticks. It doesn’t manipulate us with fear or addiction, just promises us a good deal and a delicious dinner. And if the price of that illusion is $2.99 and standing in a long (but actually quite fast-moving) line at the check-out, then so be it. Maybe – just maybe – this is the most honest hustle in America.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

The anti-Masonic roots of the Republican party

I suppose the big anniversary event of the coming new year is the semi-quincentennial of the American Revolution. I’m all for celebrating revolution and secession but spare a good thought for the bicentennial we’ll be celebrating hereabouts in 2026: that of the Morgan Affair, featuring betrayal, a possible murder, an enduring mystery and a political eruption whose ejecta would one day help form the Republican party.

I’m writing this while sitting on the polished granite bench in the Batavia Cemetery dedicated to my late friend and swimming teacher Catherine Roth, grande dame, who waged a righteously “wrothful” battle against the urban renewers who razed and ruined so much of downtown Batavia, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Greatest Generation my ass!)

Through the bare boughs of the towering maples, I espy the cenotaph honoring our town’s most famous drunk, Captain William Morgan, who was no more a captain than Harland Sanders was a colonel. Nor was he the eponym of the sorority-girl rum. Rather, Morgan was an apostate member of the Masonic Order who was – or was he? – kidnapped by Masons, furious that he had revealed their rituals, and drowned in the Niagara River in 1826, thereby setting off a ferocious reaction against “secret societies” and begetting the Anti-Masonic party, the first third party in American political history.

William Morgan was one of those ne’er-do-wells whom Fate or Providence elect to martyrdom. (Or, if the cynical Masons are correct, sham martyrdom of the Jim Morrison-lounged-around-Paris-for-the-next-50-years variety.)

Morgan, a footloose stonemason (ironically), had been initiated into the LeRoy, New York, chapter of the ancient fraternal order in 1825. He moved the following year to nearby Batavia, whose more fastidious Masonic chapter rejected the application of a man they regarded as an indolent blowhard. Plotting revenge, Morgan vowed to expose the inner workings of Masonry. For this the renegade was kidnapped and on September 11 – there’s that date again – he disappeared.

Morgan’s book, Freemasonry Exposed and Explained, described the order’s sadomasochistic-flavored initiation rites (the votive’s naked breast is spiked with the point of a compass) and lurid punishments for vocal apostasy: “To have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea at low water-mark.” Ouch!

“Like wildfire” doesn’t begin to capture the incendiary public response to Morgan’s alleged murder. Masonry was arraigned as an elitist, possibly Satanic entity bent on subverting the republic. After all, its tentacles reached throughout the ruling class: New York Governor DeWitt Clinton was a Mason, as were numerous Founders, among them George Washington and Ben Franklin.

Within a year, Anti-Masons were being elected to the New York State Assembly. By 1830, the party had sent members to Congress and captured the governorship of Vermont. In my home of rural Genesee County, Anti-Masons held every countywide office from 1827-33. The party’s 1832 presidential candidate, William Wirt, even carried Vermont. (That Wirt was a Mason suggests the complications to come.)

As will happen, the more picturesque and flamboyant Anti-Masons – who were wont to refer to Masonry as “the Beast with seven heads and ten horns” – were displaced by scheming politicos. The party was taken over by the wily political operators Thurlow Weed and William Seward, later leading lights in the Republican party, who essentially purged the Anti-Masonic party of anti-Masonry, replacing the purpose embedded in its very name with a dirigiste agenda of internal improvements and a national bank.

The party did leave us some truly rousing campaign songs. One of my favorites begins, “The Freemen bring the monster/ Before the public place it/ And though it scowl with phiz most foul/ Will Anti-Masons face it.” Another concludes, “Tis Morgan whose blood still proclaims from the ground/ That life is in peril where Masonry’s found.” Talk about demonizing one’s foes! (As historian Lee Benson wrote, understatedly, “Anti-Masons tended not to believe in venial sins.”)

So what did it all mean? American Masonry was decimated, especially in the Northeast, though it would eventually return as an inoffensive civic-minded organization, sponsor of Little League teams and blood drives and the like. William Morgan’s body was never found. Perhaps he slept with the fishes, though to this day Masons insist that he escaped and found refuge in Canada or the Caribbean. His memory lives here, though, embodied in the cenotaph upon which I gaze.

Finally, we can’t forget Morgan’s fetching young wife, Lucinda, who evidently had a thing for notorious Upstate New Yorkers. She later became one of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Smith, too, was murdered. That gal was bad, bad luck.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

The fields of science and pedagogy are agreed, for now at least, that humans who shut down their minds, temporarily but with increasing frequency, and substitute artificial intelligence for them, end by weakening their mental capabilities in the areas of cognition, memory and attention span; put more bluntly, they make themselves progressively stupider by a physical and psychic process that the least intellectual of what used to be called “jocks” would have had no difficulty understanding, owing to their own regimen of physical training and endurance.

Nevertheless, it is a finding that the digital geniuses of Silicon Valley apparently failed to anticipate; or perhaps they did so decades ago but pressed ahead in the expectation that the dumber the human race, the more money it would be eager to shell out for their magical mental crutches as an evolutionary replacement for its primitive cerebellum, cerebrum and brain stem.

Cynical of them, of course, but entirely logical and far-seeing; prophetical, even. Virtually every invention since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution has been what came eventually to be called a labor-saving device. The steam locomotive made travel over distance infinitely more comfortable and less demanding than travel by coach and horses. The automobile did the same for travel by horseback. Machinery replaced factory laborers with machine operators. Household gadgetry freed housewives from most physical labor save that of pushing buttons, while leaving them the lion’s part of the day to watch soap operas, go shopping, gossip and have clandestine affairs with the postman.

It remained only for that most strenuous and unpleasant type of labor, deeply resented by all but the most minuscule portion of humanity – that of the mental kind, also known as thinking – to be made redundant. Now, with the advent of AI, this final Everest standing in the way of the fullest realization of human bliss is, it appears, about to be summited and the flag representing the ultimate stage of industrial and scientific progress planted and unfurled to wave on the alpine winds. Its emblem will depict a fly on a can of garbage on a background of bilious yellow.

Marx knew what he was about two centuries ago when he defined “workers” as physical laborers, thus intimating that all who make their living by intellectual occupations are society’s drones, members of a pan-cultural Drones’ Club established to exploit the heroic, self-sacrificing “working classes” dedicated to performing civilization’s most strenuous, exhausting and unpleasant tasks. For Marxists, physical labor is by far the most noble type of work, highly deserving of grateful recognition in terms of status and financial reward by the rest of society. (I knew a fellow student at Columbia who argued that a subway driver should make more money than a medical doctor or corporate executive, his job being presumably less pleasant than theirs, though tastes vary of course.)

The truth is that the opposite is really the case. Compared with the intellectual classes, the laboring masses, who, being unacquainted with the rigors of mental, professional and artistic engagement – that of the mind and of the imagination – do not know what truly arduous work is. The heroic worker rises early in the morning, punches the clock when he gets to the work site, and again when he leaves it, having put in exactly the hours his boss – and his union – specify. He goes from the workplace straight to home, or to his bar, or to his sport, never gets a call from the boss after hours, and needs never give his job a thought until the alarm clock sounds again in the morning. The mental requirements of his job are, typically, nil compared with those imposed by the learned professions, and even by business.

Granted, a substantial proportion of so-called intellectual work today – in the colleges and universities, in the media, in “entertainment,” and even in the so-called arts – is simply counterfeit work: vacuous, silly, irresponsible and often immoral, requiring little if any talent, effort, or real intelligence to accomplish. Compared to it, the honest labor of an electrician, a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, a cowhand, a roughneck (I know – I’ve worked in the oilpatch), or a lumberjack has a plain and simple heroism about it, in particular where it involves the physical skill and danger that artificial intelligence can never replace.

Still, the fact remains that for the vast majority of people, manual work is preferable to (being mentally less painful than) work of the intellectual sort, without which the great and complex systems of human imagination, invention and organization that create and perpetuate the jobs that the laboring class depends upon would not exist.

Artificial intelligence need not affect the blue-collar workforce much, if at all, save to the extent that it replaces human brawn and physical skill with computers and ChatGPT. But it could have devastating consequences for the educated – the so-called intellectual – class by encouraging it to atrophy its oh-so-superior brains by relying on AI to do its work for it; work that only the human brains that created it can, in the final analysis, intelligently do. Intelligence is the engine that has always made the world go round, and always will be – human intelligence, that is, not its artificial substitute.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Anne of Green Gables perfected the kitchen mishap

There’s something wickedly entertaining in reading about other people’s kitchen debacles, whether actual or fictional. They’re just so relatable. The jelly that won’t jell in Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives is cruelly hilarious, but the best culinary catastrophe in classic fiction, for my money, is in Anne of Green Gables.

Stylish guests, including the upper-crust Mrs. Chester Ross, are dining at Green Gables and our ebullient Anne is on her very best behavior. All goes well until Marilla arrives with the pudding and a pitcher of pudding sauce.

On spotting the pudding sauce, our heroine’s eyes grow wide and terrified. In awful technicolor, recent events replay before her: how days ago, instructed to cover the sauce in the pantry, she forgot; how the next morning, remembering, she came back, only to find floating in it a mouse which had raided its last larder. How, horrified, she fished out the deceased with a spoon, disposed of the corpse and gave the spoon a thorough scrubbing, but forgot all about the contaminated sauce – until the fateful moment when Marilla carries it in, warmed up, to serve their ritzy guests with the dessert.

Throwing caution to the wind, Anne rises in her place and shrieks before the assembled company, “Marilla, you mustn’t use that pudding sauce. There was a mouse drowned in it. I forgot to tell you before.”

The silence that descends is punctuated only by the look Mrs. Chester Ross gives Anne and the fiery complexion of Marilla, whisking away the pudding sauce.

The joy of this vignette is that it goes beyond a simple food flop into the realm of social irony. We don’t just have a mishap; we get to be onlookers as several different kinds of mishap occur in quick succession, under the horrified and ritzy nose of Mrs. Chester Ross. Why this situation, doubtless excruciating for its main actors, should be so entertaining for everyone else, remains one of the little mysteries of human nature.

In late-Victorian Prince Edward Island, creatures in the food are a decided solecism. “Are you sure there ain’t a spider in that cream jug, Kate?” inquires the catty Cousin Ernestine in Anne of Windy Poplars. “I’m afraid I saw one when you poured my cup.” “We never have spiders in our cream jugs,” is the ominous response, and the kitchen door slams. How different from the social setting aboard ship with Patrick O’Brien in the Georgian era, where the lesser of two weevils, emerging from the crumbs of the captain’s meal, is appreciated and praised.

Better-known in Anne of Green Gables is the disaster of the liniment cake. Anne, eager to impress the new minister’s wife who’s coming to tea, bakes a vanilla layer cake that is, to all external appearances, a showstopper.

Unseen in the background, however, Fate is quietly slipping lead into the boxing gloves (not my own expression; P.G. Wodehouse’s). The vanilla jar from which Anne poured the cake’s flavoring had been refilled with anodyne liniment, a vile-tasting herbal remedy. Anyone who’s been convinced to try Buckley’s Syrups (advertised as “the taste people love to hate”) will probably sympathize with the feelings of the poor minister’s wife, adjured to try a slice as Anne had made it especially for her. She can’t keep a poker face and the truth comes out, to Anne’s extreme embarrassment.

Despite these scarring incidents, people generally eat like kings in the Anne series. It’s all such comfort food, too. They’re constantly roasting chickens, fetching strawberry pies out of the pantry, and coming home of a winter’s evening to the smell of roasting ham and buttered toast.

Anne’s first taste of ice cream comes at the Sunday School picnic. They make the dessert right there and then in the old-fashioned, pre-electricity way, with the sweetened cream in a tin liner, placed in a bucket of salted ice and churned by hand until frozen. “Sublime,” is Anne’s review.

Though nowhere in Prince Edward Island can be called far from the sea, the delight of freshly caught fish only comes up in Book 5, after she marries Gilbert, now a doctor, and moves to a fishing town. The highlight of their first meal is the sea trout given to them by Captain Jim. “They’re fresh as trout can be, Mistress Blythe. Two hours ago they were swimming in the Glen Pond.”

Anne outgrows her trials with baking; her chocolate cake recipe is to become the envy of her best friend Diana, who guiltily sneaks slice after slice as they picnic together, slimming regime notwithstanding.

Anne is also fortunate in securing the culinary services of her loyal housekeeper Susan Baker, who knows her way around a mixing bowl, feathering “an orange-frosted cake with coconut” without a second thought and who fills the pages of the later Anne books with monkeyface cookies, gold-and-silver cake, jam roly-poly, stuffed leg of lamb and apple crunch pie.

In L.M. Montgomery’s world, the good eat well and like it; the bad do neither. Aunt Mary Maria, the nightmare guest who comes to visit and never leaves in Anne of Ingleside, is entirely unappreciative of the culinary delights proffered for her enjoyment and does her best to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment as well.

At Christmas dinner, her running commentary is as follows: “White meat only, please. (James, eat your soup quietly.) Ah, you are not the carver your father was, Gilbert. He could give everyone the bit she liked best. (Twins, older people would like a chance now and then to get a word in edgewise. I was brought up by the rule that children should be seen and not heard.) No, thank you, Gilbert, no salad for me. I don’t eat raw food. Yes, Annie, I’ll take a little pudding. Mince pies are entirely too indigestible.”

This frightful relative stays on for months and months, appreciating nothing yet dropping dark hints about selling her home and moving in with them forever. Politeness prevents Anne and Gilbert from showing a blood relation the door.

In the end, it’s a birthday cake that finally drives out their unbidden guest. Enraged by the 55 candles revealing her age to the party guests, Aunt Mary Maria packs up and stalks out, “forgiving everybody with her last breath.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Is this the end of the French croissant?

Occasionally, a French person reveals – without any malice or superciliousness – that they run on an alternative operating system from us Brits. And on an entirely different motherboard from our American cousins.

Over the years of gathering supporting anecdotes, a surprising theme has emerged: butter. Take my first visit to Paris, more than 30 years ago. I innocently asked for butter with my croissant. Simple answer: “Non.” Naturally, I remonstrated. The waiter retorted: “A croissant eeez butter!”

And, in fairness, he had a point. Upon biting into said viennoiserie, I had to concede: it was nothing like the dry grocery store versions I was used to. Moments later, a small pot of raspberry confiture was graciously placed on my table. (To this day, it remains the best service I’ve ever received in Paris.)

Fast-forward 20 years. I’m in rural Brittany, ordering a ham and cheese baguette. This time, the young woman behind the counter asked if I’d like butter. “Mais bien sûr!” Clearly irritated by my overconfidence, she spread it thinly, added the fillings, and was about to wrap when I piped up with a final request. Mayonnaise? “But you already ’av butter!” Her revulsion was palpable.

Still smarting from my Paris humiliation decades earlier, I instinctively dug in. After all, I knew what I wanted. Butter and mayonnaise are hardly strangers in a sandwich – and I happen to be an expert in my own taste. She resentfully slopped some on, gratis. I asked for mayo on my wife’s sandwich too, if only to normalize it.

When we moved to France permanently, we rented a tiny house in the center of a small Catalan town. Our British landlord drew our attention to the croissantière just around the corner. Assuming this was a veritable French term for “croissant specialist” (it isn’t), I investigated the next morning. The croissants did not disappoint – still warm, they transported me back to that Parisian revelation. So naturally, I returned the next day. And the next…

“You’ll get fat,” the croissant-maker’s wife warned, deadpan, as she handed over the bag. I looked up, expecting a smile. There was none. I tried to hide my offense, but her comment bounced around my head for days. It wasn’t just the bluntness – it was the complete lack of commercial instinct. In the UK or US, such patronage would earn you loyalty points and a branded tote bag. In France, you receive an aesthetic warning.

Ashamed but still addicted, I tried to ration myself. Mercifully, a few years later, we moved to a nearby village with its own boulangerie. A fresh start. The next morning, brimming with anticipation, I bit into my new dealer’s wares. Gone was the delicate shatter of buttery lamination. Absent was the fragrant plume of warm dairy. What I tasted was more like… wax. Hydrogenated, seed-oil-infused wax. It stopped me mid-bite.

I soon learned the truth. Many bakeries, faced with high butter prices and early mornings, have outsourced croissant production to industrial suppliers. These “croissants in waiting” arrive frozen and full of margarine. A croissant pur beurre can contain up to 30 percent real butter by weight. The industrial kind? Next to nothing. But thanks to the slippery language of au beurre versus pur beurre, no one’s technically lying. Roquefort has a charter. Camembert has a lawyer. The croissant? No such protection.

I now conduct covert pastry runs to our neighboring town. I smuggle them home in unmarked bags, slipping them past my own boulangerie like a man hiding dinner receipts from his wife – except the mistress is covered in egg wash.

It’s tragic, considering the way the French can deify food, to witness them quietly debase it. The croissant, that most sacred of breakfast icons, is now often a margarine-infused counterfeit.

Frédéric Roy, a Nice-based baker, has tried to sound the alarm. His campaign to label industrial pastries has gained traction, but little legal weight. Meanwhile, “butter blend” croissants made with palm oil and diacetyl are increasingly sold as au beurre – just without the taste or conscience.

Healthwise, it’s a grim spectrum. On one end, the artisanal croissant – a golden coronary wrapped in charm. On the other, the industrial version: trans fat-free, yes, but with all the digestibility of a scented candle.

If you want to evaluate the prosperity of any French neighborhood, buy the most expensive croissant you can find. It will tell you the real story.

And perhaps that’s the truest measure of where France now finds itself: a country still wrapped in the golden flake of tradition, but filled more and more with something else entirely. The croissant was once a luxury. Then it became a daily pleasure. Now it’s a performance – ersatz, over-rehearsed and mostly margarine.

A rich pastry for a country that can no longer afford the substance, but insists on maintaining the form.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

How America fell in love with the G&T

The gin and tonic has had quite the journey. From humble beginnings protecting British explorers against malaria, it has become the country’s favorite cocktail. Abroad, Italians grown tired of spritzes now opt for it come aperitivo hour. The Japanese bow before it. The world stumbles after it. Yet there is one land the G&T has been slow to conquer: America, the land of vodka sodas and zero-calorie seltzers.

In recent years that has begun to change. While overall consumption of spirits is down, sales of gin in the US are on the rise and expected to grow some 6.5 percent a year for the rest of this decade. Craft distilleries are in the vanguard: in California, gin is infused with citrus and coastal herbs. In the South, it might be perfumed with watermelon rind or magnolia blossoms. And while US liquor stores still devote more space to vodka and whiskey than anything else, gin is getting more of a look-in. Whole Foods stocks cans of ready-to-drink Tanqueray gin and tonic. After all, there’s only so many shots of kombucha one can stomach.

As youngsters turn away from alcohol and toward their smartphones, those still drinking increasingly look for smaller quantities of better-quality alcohol. Slamming shots is out; “mindful drinking,” low-ABV tipples and “savoring the mouthfeel” are in. Bright young things have discovered that the G&T looks chic without adding to the waistline. In a social media age, its “old money” good looks are important. It is certainly more photogenic than a whiskey and Coke.

It helps that the G&T is so easy to make: during the pandemic, we saw the rise of home bartending. Many Americans discovered they could make a better G&T at home than they’d ever got from a harassed Manhattan bartender. You can dress it up with rosemary sprigs or a cucumber slice – but you don’t have to. All you really need is a highball glass and a slice of lemon or lime, and you’ve got something that looks suitably sophisticated.

But the G&T’s rise is about culture, not just calories or convenience. Gin has never occupied the same place in the American psyche as other cocktails. Hemingway drank his way across the States, from Michigan trout streams to Florida sunsets, but he was a man of daiquiris, rum and whiskey, rather than the gin and tonic. Meanwhile, Don Draper may have toyed with a G&T while lounging in a well-cut Brooks Brothers suit on a summer afternoon, but Mad Men’s soul was really soaked in martinis and old fashioneds. It is gin’s foreignness that creates the G&T’s appeal today. The biggest-selling gin brands in the US are British – Gordon’s, Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire. And in an era where everything must be artisanal, sustainable and storied, the G&T arrives pre-packaged with a sense of history and exoticism. Once a form of medicine, soaked in Empire, gin is a drink with a grand story. Gin’s curious-sounding botanicals create a sense of sophistication. “Juniper, coriander seed and angelica root have the reassuring ring of Old World complexity and Continental charm.”

Americans import European drinks – and drinking rituals. The aperitivo hour was once alien; then suddenly every rooftop bar in New York was a sea of Aperol spritzes. Never mind that Europe today is economically stagnant and politically fractious; culturally, it remains unimpeachable. To sip a G&T on a Brooklyn terrace is to feel oh so suave, to be in touching distance of London.

Nostalgia for the aristocratic drawing room may have helped leaven the G&T moment. The real-life Downton Abbey – Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England – produces its own gin, which it sells across the US. Adam von Gootkin, who co-founded the brand alongside the 8th Earl of Carnarvon (whose family seat is Highclere), told me: “American palates are rediscovering the elegance of gin. People want story, terroir and craftsmanship. The gin and tonic is the revenge of the classics. For too long, we let neon drinks and novelty shots steal the spotlight. Now, people want authenticity – and you can’t fake that with food coloring.”

Inevitably, celebrities are getting in on the act. Ryan Reynolds has Aviation Gin. Margot Robbie – who has confessed that she used to stash vanilla rooibos teabags in her handbag to rescue bad G&Ts at London nightclubs – is behind Papa Salt Coastal Gin.

Perhaps tonic will be the next component to get the celeb treatment: the market for premium bottled mixers is booming. The British brand Fever-Tree is doing spectacularly well in the US. It now holds the pole position for both tonic water and ginger beer. Not bad in a country with a long-standing attachment to soda from a gun.

America will inevitably make the G&T its own. Espressos were for Italians, then Starbucks came along. Sushi went from Japanese delicacy to everyday LA lunch. The G&T may never dethrone the vodka soda or the bourbon old fashioned but a drink that’s journeyed from the balmy terraces of the British Raj to Brooklyn will take a fair bit of stopping. Downton’s preferred drink is coming downtown.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Franco Zeffirelli’s slice of paradise in Positano

If you say the name Franco Zeffirelli to anyone under about 40, you’re likely to be met with bemusement. Find any opera or film lover over that age, however, and you will be greeted with a warm exclamation – “Ah!” – followed by a recitation of the Italian director’s greatest achievements.

From his emergence in international culture in the 1960s with his seminal film of Romeo and Juliet to his legendary work on stage with such operatic titans as Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo, Zeffirelli became synonymous with tasteful, intelligent productions of the classics, all of which made him, for a time, the best-known cultural figure in Italy.

It is fair to say that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, didn’t always get it right, personally or politically. As his career went on, some of his films tended towards the self-parodic and as a man, he seemed torn between his right-wing political instincts and his own sexuality. To further the former, he joined Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and came out with reactionary, even shocking public statements on such subjects as abortion and, ironically, homosexuality; as regards the latter, a string of young, handsome actors who worked with the director have come forward since his death in 2019 to testify to his distinctly hands-on working process.

Still, while one would never wish to whitewash Zeffirelli’s actions, there is no doubt that he was a man of exquisite taste, which he extended into both his work and his private residence, Villa Treville, just outside Positano on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. When Zeffirelli’s biographer David Sweetman was summoned to meet the great man there, it was an inauspicious journey. “It took hours. The taxi bill was unreal, but eventually we arrived at the top of this little winding road. And there was just a gate, and I had to go down all these bloody stairs to the villa.”

However, the destination soon justified the expense and effort. “Eventually, some ancient servant let me in, and I was shown on to this opera set. I’ve never seen anything like it. It seemed, just possibly, the most beautiful place on Earth.”

Sweetman was not wrong. Zeffirelli lived at Villa Treville for more than 40 years, during which time he saw Positano change from an obscure fishing village and occasional haunt of the glitterati into one of the world’s most celebrated destinations for cultured A-listers. He did more than his share to bring in international icons, musing on his guests as he sold his home in 2007: “Leonard Bernstein, Laurence Olivier, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor – it sounds like a legend, doesn’t it?”

Now, a decade and a half since it first changed from being a private home of legendary status to what is surely even this ultra-exclusive area’s most impressive boutique hotel Villa Treville is keen both to honor its past and, in particular, its legendary owner, but also to look to the future. Other five-star options are available, in an area filled with opulent accommodations, but none has quite this level of cachet or history.

The hotel is reached via private transfer from Naples, which takes about an hour and a half. The last part of the journey is comfortably the most spectacular, as the car must negotiate the narrow roads hugging the Lattari Mountains, and peerless views of the Amalfi Coast are on offer to the enraptured passengers: assuming, of course, that the winding, vertiginous journey has not led to carsickness. Yet upon arrival, earthly cares and worries slip away in moments. Not for Villa Treville some grand, attention-seeking entrance. Instead, the car suddenly turns off through a discreet private gate and you walk down a small track into the reception, where the views – the peerless views – of glittering blue sea and the houses of Positano alike are enough to make even the most jaded and weary of travelers pause, slack-jawed in admiration.

Wandering round Villa Treville is an education both in aesthetics and in history. While the hotel has been carefully and sympathetically expanded from Zeffirelli’s day – it now comprises six houses, rather than the three (or tre ville) that it originally consisted of when the director lived here – it retains his sense of chutzpah and style in every well-furnished nook and cranny. There have, inevitably, been a few nods to the present day, with a useful lift connecting the various floors and, of course, wifi, along with the usual conveniences of a five-star hotel, but what is so refreshing about Villa Treville is that it has been kept as close to Zeffirelli’s own lifestyle and taste as possible.

To this end, the director’s books, personal possessions and objets d’art are festooned around the hotel, along with countless photographs of him and his famous friends. If you’re an opera lover, you’ll be delighted to find Zeffirelli’s original sketches for many of the set designs of the shows that he staged at the Met, the Royal Opera House and beyond. But this sense of the impresario just having popped out for a few moments extends far beyond simple décor. At breakfast in the appropriately named Maestro’s restaurant, for instance, guests are encouraged to walk into what was Zeffirelli’s kitchen to choose from a comprehensive and generous buffet selection of fresh fruit, locally sourced cheeses and deliciously decadent cakes and pastries, all of which are accompanied by a wider selection of eggs and pancakes from the à la carte menu.

The views are peerless, the food sublime; it’s enough to make you want to stay here forever. Zeffirelli was nothing if not well-connected: many of the suites bear the names of some of the famous guests at Villa Treville. Many of them have individual quirks that extend far beyond decorative decisions. The Bernstein suite, named after the composer, conductor and regular visitor Leonard Bernstein, contains a shower in the form of a converted bread oven and an outdoor bathtub in its tropical garden, just as the largest and most lavish suite, named after Zeffirelli himself, has been kept largely as it was when it was his bedroom.

Yet even the humbler accommodations, junior suites named after operas he staged such as Tosca and Carmen, still feature whitewashed tiles on the floors, walk-in showers, wonderfully large and comfortable beds and, of course, those breathtaking views, which manage to enrapture even the most seen-it-all of travelers whether by day or night.

The whole point of coming to the hotel is to relax and unwind, rather than embark on a hectic program of activities. Which is not to say that there aren’t plenty of things on offer to entertain you. Peerless treatments, complete with Barbara Sturm cosmetics, are conducted in the La Traviata spa, which itself is housed in a greenhouse rescued from one of Zeffirelli’s opera productions. It’s as peaceful and tranquil a place to unwind as you can imagine.

Then, if you wish to pep things up a bit, slide over to the all-white, appropriately named Bianca Bar, and admire the Moorish decor (again, another Zeffirelli holdover) while sipping one of the beautifully made and deceptively strong cocktails. Whether you fancy a classic espresso martini, a negroni or a twist on an old favorite, there will be something palate-cleansing on offer for a pre-prandial.

One of the joys of Villa Treville – and presumably the reason why it pays host to A-list celebrities who have recently included Madonna and Jennifer Lopez – is that it sticks firmly to a policy of complete discretion. The only people who are welcome here are guests of the hotel, meaning that dinner at Maestro’s, which is usually held outside on the terrace, is a relaxed and relatively informal affair. Chef Vincenzo Castaldo specializes in the pasta dishes of your dreams – if you want to see how they’re made, private cookery classes can be arranged, along with everything from ceramics decoration to cocktail masterclasses – and they’re served up along with a selection of pescetarian-heavy dishes, accompanied by a finely chosen variety of local Italian wines.

Yet even here, the maxim is one of pleasing the guests. I remarked in passing how much I’d love an oyster; a few moments later, a pair of beautifully dressed specimens, complete with apple granita, appeared before me, as if by magic. And magic, in its various forms, is what’s to be found in this most blissfully sybaritic corner of the Amalfi Coast. There is something otherworldly about Villa Treville, which clings to the side of the mountain like an especially opulent barnacle. Immersing oneself in this lifestyle for a few days is as enjoyable an experience as it’s possible to imagine.

Zeffirelli once remarked that, “Now I could start creating my dream world out of the three villas.” Entering into his dream is opulent, extravagant and unique. Just like its famous creator, then.

From €830 ($950) per night. For more information, visit: www.villatreville.com.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Cheers to corkscrews!

For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630, but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I attended, with everyone desperately trying to open bottles using keys, pens, knives etc. Or using that technique where you bang the bottle against a wall with the heel of a shoe. Halcyon days. More likely the Cavaliers would have just taken the top off cleanly with a swift blow from a saber.

Early devices for extracting corks were called “bottle screws.” According to wine writer Hugh Johnson, the word “corkscrew” was first used in 1720. From there, this handy little piece of equipment has conquered the world, from early versions which were simply a piece of metal with a wooden handle to the full nerdery of the $130 Screwpull – beloved by wine bores of a certain vintage. The most common one when I was taking my first steps as a wine drinker was the metal man with his hands up, which usually just drilled a hole in the cork rather than removing it. As someone who has opened thousands of bottles of wine, I can safely say that the best corkscrew is a good quality waiter’s friend. I never leave home without one.

If you want to see the sheer imagination and thought humans have put in to removing a bit of tree bark from a glass receptacle, I’d highly recommend visiting the corkscrew museum (yes, there really is one, I literally have the T-shirt) at Domaine Gerovassiliou near Thessaloniki in Greece. There are corkscrews with winged demons on, others that look like medieval torture devices and some that fit into the top of walking canes, so a gentleman need never be without one.

But at some point, will this essential piece of drinker’s kit be seen only in a museum? A report from kitchenware retailer Lakeland says just over a quarter of British 18- to 24-year-olds own a corkscrew – compared with 81 percent of over-65s. I’m not entirely sure this is the killer statistic everyone thinks it is, though. One in four youngsters having a corkscrew means you’re in with a good chance of finding one in shared accommodation. We didn’t all have corkscrews when I was in my early twenties. But I did. I was a budding wine bore.

There’s no doubt, however, that the traditional cork is dying out, thanks to the ubiquitous screw cap. This has gone from being seen only on the cheapest wines to an entirely respectable way to close a bottle, especially in the Antipodes. Something like 70 percent of Australian and 95 percent of New Zealand wines are sealed this way. Screw caps are more reliable, too. It’s estimated that between 3 and 8 percent of  corks are tainted with a compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) which produces the characteristic “corked” smell of damp basements. Extremely annoying when you’ve been keeping a bottle for a special occasion.

And yet for all its occasional unreliability, I’ll miss the cork when it finally disappears. A large part of the appeal of wine is the ritual of opening the bottle, the satisfying pop followed by the gurgle of the pour. It all builds anticipation. Now, where did I put my corkscrew?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

What makes a ‘survivor?’

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: “I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise.

Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,” wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual “grooming?” Are they victims or are they survivors? Or should they be neither?

Last week, after he withdrew his name for consideration as the chair of Britain’s national grooming inquiry, the thoughtful retired policeman Jim Gamble made a comment using both terms: “The police have understandably lost the trust of victims and survivors because some were corrupt.”

In 2021, this sense of survivor was noticed by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “A person who has experienced a traumatic event or past abuse, especially of a sexual or psychological nature.”

In 1975 there was an example in the Los Angeles Free Press: “Welcome all survivors of rape, child molestation, welfare lines, botched abortions, unemployment and typing pools.” There’s a certain bathos in “typing pools,” oppressive as they might have been. As for victim, in the sense of “a person who has been intentionally harmed, injured, or killed,” the OED notes that “in some contexts survivor is now used in preference to victim.”

There has been a recent trend to turn misfortune into victimhood, as in the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter campaigns. Donald Trump presents his prosecutions as evidence of his victimhood, but when a bullet nicks his ear, he brands himself a survivor.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day.

The robbery was initially dubbed the “heist of the century,” a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. There were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies.

But soon details emerged that suggested the gang of four weren’t quite of the caliber of the thieves immortalized in the Hollywood movie Ocean’s Eleven. They left behind a trail of clues: the two disc cutters used to open the display cabinets, a blowtorch, gloves, a walkie-talkie, a yellow vest, a blanket and the truck with extendable ladder. In their haste to escape, the thieves dropped Empress Eugénie’s crown, festooned with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds. In total, explained Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, the police found “more than 150 DNA, fingerprint and other traces” at the scene.

Within a week two men were in custody, who swiftly admitted “partial” responsibility; for their role in the heist. A third was arrested a few days later. All were petty criminals from the Paris suburbs. “It is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” said Beccuau.

One of the suspects is allegedly a former YouTube star famous for his motorbike stunts that he showed off on social media. According to media reports, his real name is Abdoulaye N, a 39-year-old with a rap sheet for petty crime stretching back two decades. Friends and associates claim that since he became a father he had settled down, and one told the New York Times: “He’s really the last guy I would have thought of for something like that.”

One of the three men in custody – not identified – was described at the weekend as a “good Samaritan.” Apparently he once came to the aid of a stranded motorist on the Paris ring road in September, offering a “calm and reassuring” presence to the distressed driver.

The fourth member of the gang has not been caught. Is he the one with the brains, as well as the booty? The thieves certainly knew what they were after. Rayan Ferrarotto, the commercial director of the French diamond merchant Celinni, says the jewels were stolen to order. “When you look at major art thefts, it is almost always the case that private collectors or enthusiasts commission the thefts to own a unique piece… it’s all about prestige and exclusivity.”

Beccuau says she is keeping an open mind about the theft. “We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewellery… it could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade; all leads are being explored.”

Is one possibility that getting caught quickly was part of the thieves’ plan? It subsequently emerged that the truck used in the robbery was stolen nine days earlier by two men who threatened the driver. Furthermore, that incident took place in Louvres, a town north-east of Paris. Perhaps the thieves had a good sense of humor. Or did they want to draw attention to themselves?

Knowing they had left behind so much incriminating evidence, why didn’t they flee France immediately instead of returning to their stamping ground in the suburbs of Paris?

Unless their bungling was all part of the plan. The maximum sentence in France for theft without violence is three years in prison and a €45,000 fine. In the case of aggravating circumstances, such as a gang robbery, the maximum sentence is five years in prison and a €75,000 fine. This increases to seven years when the theft involves “cultural property that is part of the public domain.”

With good behavior, and a willingness to “demonstrate efforts towards reintegration,” a prisoner can have six months per full year of incarceration reduced. In other words, even with a seven-year sentence, a well-behaved prisoner would be released after half that time.

In 2009, an armored cash van and its driver disappeared as it made a drop at a bank in Lyon. Initially it was feared the vehicle and its €11.6 million in deposit boxes had been hijacked. Eleven days later the driver, Tony Musulin, gave himself up and police retrieved €9 million of the money. Unfortunately, he said, €2.5 million had been stolen from him. He was sentenced to three years in prison. The missing money has never been found. In 2019, Musulin was briefly arrested in London when he tried to convert £75,000 into Euros at a bureau de change. He was released without charge after explaining that the money came from the sale of his Ferrari.

Musulin became something of a cult hero in France. Mugs and T-shirts were sold online emblazoned with “Tony Musulin, Best Driver 2009.” The Louvre thieves have also been feted in some quarters; a German company has used the robbery to promote its trucks with extendable ladders, telling customers they’re perfect for “when you need to move fast.”

Are the alleged perpetrators of the Louvre heist happy to go to prison for a few years knowing that when they get out they’ll get some of the proceeds? Or perhaps they are just opportunistic thieves who got lucky because the Louvre security was even more amateur than they were.

My murderous, malfunctioning Aga

People always divine themselves through material goods: hence the obsession with the Aga, recently detailed by my friend Rachel Johnson in these pages. Rachel loves her Aga – well, her Agas, she has two – because it needs to be defended from bourgeois socialists who don’t have Agas: they just want them, because self-deception is the defining characteristic of the bourgeois socialist. Me, I hate mine. I used to love her because she made me feel upper middle-class, which I’m not, and now I know I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not, please take her.

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Of course, Agas are class signifiers. An Aga is like the last vestige of the country estate left after the fire sale. As in: ‘We lost the Titian but kept the Aga’. There is no Titian – there never was – but in the smoking, class-ridden ruins of this country, an Aga still means something with her solidity, her patriotism (invented in Sweden, made in Telford) and her gift for nostalgia. But there is yet still more to her than that: I wonder if the Aga is the furnace of a woman’s heart, a metal and enamel twin, which is why the husband will slide banana bread into the wife/Aga if allowed.

There is a reason women buy seven-oven Agas while hating men. The Aga is painting the study vulva pink or keeping the garden strategically untrimmed: a scream of pure, raging femininity, disguised by great marketing and bourgeois politesse. The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker (1935) was written by David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather, a genius of want-making. I read his advertising materials, and her promises, and I wanted her again. Then I punched myself in the face.

Her tasks are all feminine – cooking, heating, drying, being penetrated with cottage loaves – and, like me, she is terrible at them all. She does cook, but in her own way and her own time. She won’t be told, and if asked to cook meat will deliver a tough, turgid piece of beef, both undercooked and overcooked together. If you get wise to her – she can potentially be thwarted – and fry the meat on her hot plate, as opposed to her simmering plate, the kitchen will fill with cow-based carcinogens, and the smoke alarm will go off, because she willed it. My husband adores her. He tells us to get out of ‘his’ kitchen so he can be alone with her, like Maverick of Top Gun and his aeroplane, or the ‘three in a marriage’ lament from the late Princess Diana.

‘She heats the house,’ you say? Not true. She heats the part of the house she can touch, and in summer she heats it so well, no one can sit in the kitchen or sleep in the bedroom above. Turn her down? She behaves even worse. Oh, but she will dry your clothes. Now that is true, but, in my house, it is like drying them on a heated bin. It’s not reasonable to ask a 12-year-old boy or a 51-year-old man to wipe the Aga down so you don’t get Spaghetti Carbonara on your bedding, and even if it were, they wouldn’t do it. If guests lay the wet clothes on the hot plates – they do not understand how dangerous she is – she will set fire to the house, like Bertha Mason Rochester, the character in literature she most embodies while still being made of cast iron. The Aga is a feminist, and she is useless.

I paused between these paragraphs to make a piece of toast. Spitefully, she burnt it, and then she burnt me.

And, because she is older than I am, it is almost impossible to get her serviced because everyone who knows how to take care of her is either very old, or dead. I inherited the first heating engineer, who could still afford to live locally. Then he disappeared (died) and I fell to telephoning range shops in Truro to ask if they knew anyone who could service a Mitford-era oil-fired Aga. Eventually this brought forth Les, a tall, courtly Londoner. Les was so old he couldn’t carry the new components inside, and I had to telephone my husband to leave work to help him. Les, though, knew everything about Agas: he fiddled in the kitchen for days, face down in the tiles. Then came the bill: £1,400. It would have been more, but Les liked me. ‘I like a full-bodied woman,’ he told me, smacking his lips, because he knows enough about Agas to know they are just sex. Then Les died too.

Pens have gone extinct

Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a ward computer still had a floppy disk drive. Older readers will understand – and wince – when I say it wasn’t three-and-a-half inches but five-and-a-quarter.

I remember writing my university finals with a pen, and I remember it because I recall how it felt. The pressure of time and the pressure of the pen made the ache in my writing hand memorable. I rewrote each sentence several times, and sometimes the whole paragraph, before it reached the paper. I don’t think I’m alone in finding my thoughts quicker than my hands, even when writing in haste. These days, like almost everyone else, I don’t use a pen even to scribble a quick note – I use my phone – and for anything longer there is the keyboard. Now I don’t consider and revise my phrases as I write; I discover what they are when I see them appear on the screen.

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Does the enforced slowness of a pen encourage prose that is more thoughtful, more leisured – in some fundamental way better? Hard to discern, any more than the effect of moving away from quills, or of the Sumerian decision to abandon a strictly oral tradition. History is certainly not short of examples of those who lived in a world before typing but were prolix all the same. Charles Dickens notably failed to keep his books short, and some readers have even wondered if editorial cuts could profitably have been made to Leviticus.

The effects on poetry are even less clear. The physician McCrae, resting on the step of an ambulance just north of Ypres in 1915, took out his pen and wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’. Would poets have typed out verse if they had had phones? We can’t know, since poetry died before keyboards became universal. I’ve written poems on a computer and felt them not to suffer from the technology, but since I am not a poet – someone who writes for public remembrance, rather than to discover their own sentiments – my experience goes only so far.

Pens once played such a part in normal life that they worked their way into the plots of our fiction. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair describes people’s faces and their penmanship – ‘a fine mercantile hand’, ‘a schoolboy hand’, ‘the best of characters and handwritings’. In Shaun of the Dead, the title character is pictured with his red pen bleeding into his white shirt pocket. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shows Sean Connery rescuing Indy by squirting a fountain pen into a foe’s eye. The consequent quip – about the pen being mightier than the sword – is almost as dated now in its first part as in its second.

As a junior doctor – harried and unhappy – it was a small but certain satisfaction to return from the hospital with three pens when I’d gone in with two. Gleaming drug company ones were good, so long as one could acquire them without the soul-cheapening tedium of listening to drug reps. Old hands wouldn’t throw away an exhausted pen, but would leave it temptingly vulnerable, knowing we’d get one over on a fellow thief. I remember the pang when an initial scribble was successful, and one’s heart leapt in joy, only for a more serious use of the pen on a distant ward to reveal the remaining ink was just a trace, and one had stolen a deliberately abandoned dud.

These days the pot of pens in my kitchen goes largely untroubled. Chiefly I reach for it when the month’s bank statements arrive, which I annotate before abandoning them to the pile I always hope to rediscover when my accounts are due. Currently the pen pot contains mostly paintbrushes with badly chewed ends, the result of an artistic daughter and two inquisitive cats. There are a couple of broken pencils, a pen I took from the British Hernia Society in lieu of a fee for giving a talk, and – the one I’m proudest of – a branded ballpoint from my biotech startup.

I have never owned a fountain pen, nor ever discovered the skilful pleasure of their use, but then I have never had handwriting that was flattered by anything save privacy. Beautiful script is something I admire – even if, like extreme good looks in a man, I find it slightly suspicious. My aim was legibility. I’ve no idea what a graphologist would divine from reading the entrails of my dismal cursive, but they’d probably guess I was a doctor.

‘An elegant script is like a fine picture,’ wrote Erasmus, ‘it has a pleasure of its own which engages the author of a letter while he is composing it no less than the recipient’. One sees what he means, just as one sees that horses must once have been useful, and manhood once required being able to use a sword and wield a pen.

The scammer in the sitting room

It began when one of the care home residents I look after asked me to take her picture for her Facebook account. Harmless enough – until I noticed the photo had been requested by Michael Bublé. The messages were affectionate and convincing and before long she was being asked for personal information.

I had to find a way to gently break it to her that this was very unlikely to be Mr Bublé, which led to tears, disbelief and embarrassment. In the end, I blocked the scammer on her account – along with several other suspicious profiles. The Mental Capacity Act’s third principle states that everyone has the right to make a bad decision. However, it’s best to stop such things before we start discussing the law.

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This story isn’t unusual. Fraudsters know that older people are often more trusting, more likely to be lonely and less likely to spot the warning signs of online scams. According to the charity Independent Age, nearly three in five people aged 65 or older say they’ve been targeted by a scam, and among those who were scammed the average loss was nearly £4,000. Collectively, older people in the UK have been defrauded of an estimated £7.4 billion. About one-third say their mental health suffered as a result.

Now, a new wave of residents is arriving in care homes with iPads, smartphones, and laptops. And with them come new dilemmas. How do you manage passwords for someone with dementia? How far should staff assist with online shopping? What if a gentleman insists on browsing pornography? And what about the risk that it isn’t anonymous fraudsters exploiting residents, but staff themselves?

These are not just technical questions – they are ethical ones. The Mental Capacity Act talks about ‘best interests’, but who decides what’s in someone’s best interest when it comes to browsing the web? Block too much and you look like Big Brother; allow too much and you risk harm. The answer lies in a balance – but one that will be very hard to get right.

There are rules for everything in care homes – from how hot the bath should be to how often the fire alarm is tested. But there are no national standards on digital safeguarding. The guidance tends to be general (safeguarding from abuse, data security) rather than aimed at the emerging challenges of residents who are digitally connected and vulnerable.

That gap will soon become even larger. Within two decades, care homes will be full of people who grew up with computers; in 50 years, they’ll be full of people who have lived their entire lives online – each with dozens of accounts, social media histories, cloud storage and digital assets. Managing this digital baggage will be more complicated than storing glasses and dentures; while our current generation of pensioners are complaining of banks that have moved online, soon care homes will be full of people managing cryptocurrency wallets.

On paper, digital connection should be a triumph. Video calls stave off loneliness; online banking and shopping restore independence; social media offers stimulation. But the benefits come wrapped in danger. In ordinary households, an older person can lean on younger relatives for help. In a care home, that responsibility falls to staff. Which is why the care sector needs a framework for digital safeguarding – and fast.

There are things we could do. Care homes could appoint ‘digital champions’, training staff in cyber safety and running scam-awareness sessions for residents. Banks and tech companies could be pressed to design systems with the vulnerable in mind – interfaces that make scams harder to pull off and easier to spot or report.Perhaps they need to allow powers of attorney to more easily inherit social media or transfer control of online accounts. Regulators should begin setting standards for real online safety. Care homes will need digital-safeguarding policies as robust as their medication ones – every login, password or payment accessed by staff logged, witnessed and reviewed. Perhaps, in time, services will even have to apply Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards to restrict access to passwords, or hold best-interests meetings to address screen addiction.

Every part of life has gone online. It will be our responsibility to treat digital care as part of care itself. If all this sounds bleak, it gets worse. Artificial intelligence promises to make deception slicker than ever. Imagine a resident receiving a phone call that sounds exactly like their son, urgently asking for money. Or a video that appears to show a trusted charity worker. Deepfakes and voice clones aren’t science fiction – they’re already here. Combine those with memory loss and things get much, much worse.

A carer’s role can only go so far and families, too, will need to be part of this picture – co-managing devices, agreeing safe words, holding recovery passwords and helping monitor for scams. But that raises its own problems: sons and daughters may one day have to police their parents’ browsing habits.

But the answer is not despair, the answer may be the same as ever: talk. Regular communication between residents, families and staff about what’s real and what to do if something feels wrong will be the key. Digital safety, like any other kind, begins with trust. The real test of care in the digital age will be this: whether we can protect people from harm without stripping them of autonomy. Dignity doesn’t mean letting someone be scammed, nor does it mean cutting them off from the outside world.

Britain must quit the ECHR

Shabana Mahmood is a bright minister among a cabinet of duds, dealt a difficult hand and playing it rather well. There was a good deal to like about her speech this afternoon, launching the document describing the government’s plans to deal with refugees and deportation.

The idea of reviewing refugee status every 30 months, with a view to ending it if the country of origin is no longer dangerous, is overdue. That temporary unrest in a particular state should entitle those at the sharp end automatically to claim permanent rights to remain here is wrong, however much they may prefer their settled life in Britain, when this negatively impacts native Britons. Limiting refugees’ rights to bring numerous family members apart from immediate relatives is also right; we need to stop refugee status becoming a means of backdoor immigration for large (often very extended) family groups. Making the Home Office’s duty to provide support such as housing less onerous will help deal with those who make trouble. Equally vital are limitations on the right of illegal arrivals to apply for citizenship (up from 5 years to 20 years) and on lawfare by, as far as possible, restricting appeals and reducing opportunities for throwing last-minute spanners into the works by raising eleventh-hour modern slavery points.

Predictably, a number of Mahmood’s own party are unhappy, including human rights activist Tony Vaughan KC, persistent troublemaker Brian Leishman and veteran stirrer Stella Creasey. But the proposals make sense. Kemi Badenoch rightly said in the House that the Tories would provide support for them: Nigel Farage should do the same for Reform.

The good news is that Shabana may actually be able to get at least some of these proposals through, especially if the Opposition plays ball. It’s worth remembering that even within Labour the open borders awkward squad is matched by an (admittedly smaller) group on the right of the party, sitting for not very well-off constituencies, who see the difficulties caused by excessive immigration to both their constituents and their own electoral chances.

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Who is actually talking to the Iranians?

The bad news lies in the continuing baneful effect of the ECHR. A number of high-profile cases have shown what many would regard as some fairly flimsy excuses successfully raised against deportation on the basis of it. Even if courts actually stop relatively few deportations on direct human rights grounds, the shadowy background presence of the ECHR almost certainly causes the Home Office not to resist a large number of claims to stay and makes enforcement of a proper asylum system very difficult indeed.

The Home Secretary’s problem is how to deal with two articles of the Convention. One is article 3, dealing with inhuman or degrading treatment. Once thought of as aimed merely at torture and similar measures by member state governments, this now is interpreted as on occasion preventing people, however abusive their claim, from being deported to a country where they would face ill-treatment by even non-state actors. The other is article 8, nominally protecting family life, but now on occasion preyed upon to prevent deportation on the basis that it would interfere with any relatively serious relationship formed in this country.

On Article 8, Mahmood plans legislation to control its interpretation by UK courts with a view to reducing the scope for invoking family life as a shield against deportation. Unfortunately, this is highly problematical. The interpretation of the ECHR lies not with the British government but with the human rights court in Strasbourg; UK legislation is likely merely to cause a clash with Strasbourg and a finding of incompatibility.

On the more emotive article 3, dealing with inhuman or degrading treatment, the plan is, we are told, to push for an international agreement to reform it to make deportations easier. While this may sound like sweet reasonableness, it is even more difficult. The only way this would be possible would be for all 45 other members of the Council of Europe to agree to the change. Put bluntly, that’s not going to happen; to make it the basis of government policy is disingenuous.

The logical solution is ECHR exit, now adopted by the Tories and Reform and whispered by even a number of Labour MPs from the Red Wall. Unfortunately, for Labour this is a no-go area. Both Keir Starmer and his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, are veteran human rights lawyers, and the latter has nailed the party’s colours to the mast for a policy of remaining a member and obeying the Convention implicitly.

Faced with this, Shabana is painted into a corner. She must say, and has said, that she will not withdraw from the ECHR. As a good lawyer, she knows that she is putting forward human rights policies that she cannot substantiate. Unfortunately, stuck as she is between the rock of Strasbourg and the hard place of Hermer’s human rights fundamentalism, she has no choice.