Usa

Thursday

Dominic Green

The real theatre of war

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia was the second world war’s greatest event. The Asian theatre, much of it water, was seven times larger than the European theatre. America’s mobilisation was the most complex in history, Japan’s crimes among the most sadistic. Metaphysically, the atomic consummation altered our relationship to our habitat. Yet only three comprehensive, single-volume accounts of the war in Asia have appeared — until now the most recent being Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun in 1985. Hirohito’s War by Francis Pike sets a new standard: oceanic in scope, comprehensive in detail, subtle

Wednesday

Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon puts (lung free) haggis on the menu in America

Steerpike has long been a champion of the fight to get America to lift the ban on Scottish haggis being imported into their country. So Mr S was cheered to hear that Nicola Sturgeon has been doing her bit to fly the flag for the national dish on her trip to America. The New York Post reports that Sturgeon’s team made some last minute menu requests ahead of a work lunch at Incognito Italian bistro in New York, following her appearance on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. The Scottish-Italian proprietors Paolo Montana and Adriana Moretti reportedly proposed an all-Italian menu, but Sturgeon’s team asked them to also include Scottish classics ‘like highland haggis and smoked Scottish salmon’. Alas

Monday

Ed West

A course in Dangerous Ideas would be the perfect tonic for our dull universities

There have been a number of articles recently by American liberals warning about the intolerance of academia, in particular pointing to the dangers of a generation who’ve never had their views challenged. The latest is by an academic using the pseudonym Edward Schlosser, who writes in Vox last week: Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response,

Tuesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Sepp Blatter falls foul of the world’s CCTV system

 ‘In matters of criminal justice,’ said NatWest Three defendant David Bermingham after a London court extradited him and his co-defendants to face Enron-related US fraud charges even though nothing they were accused of looked like a crime under UK law, Britain was becoming ‘the 51st state of America’. Many Swiss citizens must have felt they were living in the 52nd  when Department of Justice agents decided, as I put it in 2013, to ‘topple a whole bowling alley of gnomes of Zurich’ in an assault on Swiss banking secrecy that forced the closure of the country’s oldest bank, Wegelin. The catalogue of US fines imposed on non-US banks for money-laundering,

Alex Krasodomski

Mass surveillance is being undermined by the ‘Snowden effect’

We are in the middle of a Crypto war again. Perhaps we have always been in the middle of a Crypto war. Since the 70s, the right and ability to encrypt private communications has been fought over, time and again. Here in the UK, Cameron’s re-election has prompted reports of a ‘turbo-charged’ version of the so-called ‘Snoopers’ Charter’, extending further the powers of surveillance that the whistleblower Edward Snowden described as having ‘no limits’. Two nights ago, the US Patriot Act expired. With it, at least officially, elements of the NSA’s bulk surveillance programme expired too. The law was passed in the wake of 9/11, in order to ‘strengthen domestic security’ and

Monday

Tessa Mayes

One human right should not be able to extinguish another human right

The Human Rights Act (1998) has a big fan base. In legal, political and celebrity circles there is much enthusiasm for it. Yet the law is not giving us the rights and freedoms we need, because each right can be played off against another. We’ve been losing our human rights in the name of human rights. In the mid-nineties I began chronicling and campaigning for a right to free speech while challenging the Human Rights Act. I couldn’t understand why Britain, a country renowned for its tolerance, was clamping down on the right to free speech (Article 10) including what newspapers published, in the name of a right to privacy (Article

Thursday

Martin Bright

Tony Blair has long been an irrelevance in the Middle East peace process

Following months of speculation, Tony Blair has finally announced he is standing down as the Quartet Representative to the Middle East after eight years in the post. It is tempting to ask whether anyone will notice. His time in the job has been marked by a stagnation of the Peace Process, a hardening of the position of increasingly belligerent Israeli governments and a growing distrust among the Palestinians. Tony Blair himself had long become an irrelevance in negotiations. The truth is that Blair was hamstrung from the moment he took the job (immediately after he stood down as Prime Minister in 2007). He was never a ‘Peace Envoy’, although there was

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

‘Trigger warnings’ are tools for censorship. They have no place in academia

I get defensive when feminists are accused of being prudes. There’s nothing prudish in critiquing a monotonously promiscuous culture; in despairing of unrealistic body standards, or believing, as I’ve argued before, that porn is healthy, even necessary, when it’s privately stashed under the mattress, but doesn’t belong on the high street. Then a bunch of students does something so reactionary in the name of feminism that we may as well scatter séance candles about the university library and revive en masse the spirit of the Victorians. At Columbia University – where Emma Sulkowicz’s campaign for redress against an alleged rapist has inflamed debate about universities’ approach to sexual assault – four undergraduates

Thursday

James Fenton

Moving pictures | 21 May 2015

About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made a palpable hit both locally and internationally. Locally it revealed what one might have guessed, that the inhabitants of Manhattan’s downtown suffered a severe lack of amenity. Every place to walk or run or ride a bike, every place to exercise the dog, is valuable and well used. This new and unusual park, restoring and converting the tracks of a disused overhead railway, was reserved neither for running nor biking nor walking the dog, but rather for strolling, sitting and sunbathing, and for the novelty of looking in on buildings

Monday

Steerpike

Obama gets personal on Twitter. Will Cameron follow suit?

With an increasing number of Twitter accounts for politicians and celebrities run by staff rather than the subjects themselves, the PR-y tweets can often make for a dull read. So Mr S is happy to report that President Obama has set up his own personal Twitter account today. Obama, who already has an account run by Organizing for Action staff, will supposedly be behind any tweets on the personal account: Surely it’s time for David Cameron to follow suit? If he does wish to, Mr S urges him to hurry. Someone has already registered the UK equivalent @PMOTUK (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom).

Thursday

Jackie Mason

Funny business

A lot of people ask what it takes to be a stand-up comic — I’ll be honest, I have absolutely no idea. What I do know is that whatever it is, a lot of people love to think they’ve either got it or they can get it. I was honoured to be in six Royal Command Performances and so of course I met Her Majesty the Queen a few times. After about the third time, she started to talk like me, tell a few jokes. Now, I’m not saying she owes her popularity to me — God forbid — but let’s be honest, when you add together the number of

Thursday

Taki

High life | 7 May 2015

If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently. I sort of went a bit nuts with the wine and the VF chief ended up with the bill. We went to a new Bagel restaurant, Chevalier, a futuristic marvel with great food and wine and even grander prices. New York is no longer elegant, and there are no longer society types dressed to the nines sitting on the banquettes and downing Manhattans. The Jewish ascendancy that downed the Wasps was as elegant as the one it replaced. William Paley, John

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Mexican wave

Tours that start in Mexico have a nasty habit of repeating on one. Of all the British groups touring in the United States at the moment, we were the only one to launch our efforts there. But the upshot is that, two weeks later and safely in New York, I am still directing a sea of unnaturally white faces. I am often asked what happens when someone falls ill on stage. The answer is that they leave it, while trying to give the impression that this is all part of the evening’s entertainment. The resulting sense of unease can be felt by everyone in the room, but is perhaps worst

Tuesday

Steerpike

Why would Ed Miliband even want to woo Russell Brand?

The Sun reports this morning that Ed Miliband recently made a late-night visit to Russell Brand’s £2 million home. Details on what was discussed remain unknown, although Labour has now confirmed that rather than Miliband’s own François Hollande moment, or a pre-emptive mansion tax inspection, it was in fact an interview. A friend of mine lives opposite Russell Brand and snapped this picture of Ed Milliband leaving his house…urm pic.twitter.com/kHGVWFbpVZ — Elisa Misu Solaris (@ElisaMisu) April 27, 2015 However, if Miliband is to appear in an episode of Brand’s online show The Trews, it’s unclear what the Labour leader hopes to gain from it. Is this really an endorsement any serious potential Prime Minister would want?

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Superheroic failure

Avengers: Age of Ultron is the second film in the Avengers franchise, as written and directed by Joss Whedon, and stars Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Mark Ruffalo as Dr Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk, who probably had to be included, as no one would have wished to piss him off. (‘IF HULK NOT IN MOVIE HULK WILL THROW CAR!’) I am not among the target audience for this particular genre, but I attended with my son (22), which was useful, as I found it confusing —

Tom Leonard

Shrunk

 New York City Nothing says New York like a psychoanalyst’s couch. Think Woody Allen or those New Yorker cartoons. It fits our perception of east-coast Americans as all neurotic and self-obsessed. But that mental picture needs updating, because traditional psychoanalysis is in dramatic decline in its traditional heartland. Across the urban US, in fact, the profession is dying out or having to change drastically. New figures from the American Psychoanalytic Association reveal that the average age of its 3,109 members is 66, up four years in a decade. More seriously, the average numbers of patients each therapist sees has fallen to 2.75. Some shrinks now never meet patients, dealing with

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Death by politics

Dead Sheep is a curious dramatic half-breed that examines Geoffrey Howe’s troubled relationship with Margaret Thatcher. Structurally it’s a Mexican bean. It leaps all over the 1980s and it keeps shifting genre from cabaret to tragedy via cheesy political satire. Some actors are impersonators, some are caricaturists, some are neither. James Wilby’s study of Howe avoids his personal mannerisms, the pensive shabbiness, the punctilious, worried eyes, and the soft beguiling purr of his vocal chords. Instead Wilby presents him as a bewildered monk tiptoeing around a lion’s den. Steve Nallon does Mrs Thatcher as a drag-queen which looks pretty odd next to Wilby’s straightforward Howe but Nallon is a master

Friday

Tom Wilson

Why wasn’t the head of Hamas properly cross-examined during his BBC interview?

When journalists have the much sought after opportunity to interview the heads of states and organisations with appalling human rights records the very least we expect is to see such people given a thorough cross-examining. What we don’t expect is for heads of terrorist organisations to be provided with a platform from which to give the equivalent of a party political broadcast and to get away with it virtually unchallenged.  And yet that is precisely what we got when the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen recently interviewed Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas. Hamas leader Meshaal warns of Israeli ‘extremism’ after elections, reads the baffling headline that accompanies Bowen’s

Thursday

Deborah Ross

All that glitters is not gold

Woman in Gold feels rather like a Jewish version of Philomena as this too is about an older woman seeking justice for what has been stolen from her in the past but, unlike the Jewish version of almost everything, this is not in any way superior, and may even be a dud. It is based on a true story, which is an excellent and fascinating story, but it’s the storytelling that counts, and the storytelling here is not only familiar and pedestrian, but so emotionally manipulative that it doesn’t come with one sentimental ending, but several in quick succession. ‘Oh good, it’s over,’ you will think to yourself, as you

Tuesday

Tim Stanley

Rand Paul’s libertarian crusade will shake up the presidential race

Finally, the presidential race got interesting. The thought of Hillary Clinton vs Jeb Bush was too much of a rerun of the same old thing: big government liberal vs big government conservative arguing about how best to spend Americans’ money. And they both share a taste for military excursions – white boots marching in foreign lands. Well, now there’s a candidate officially in the race who stands for something completely different. Rand Paul’s libertarian crusade could be about the most exciting candidacy in my political lifetime. It won’t star the most exciting candidate. Senator Paul (Kentucky) wears the standard uniform of the college Republican: blue blazer, red tie, grey slacks. The