Culture

The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment has thrust rural America into the national spotlight. Town mayor Trent Conaway, a hefty, scruffy figure who resembles many a resident of flyover country, has been all over cable news expressing his “frustration” over how the federal government has handled the disaster. “Frustration” is exactly the word I’d use to describe the predominant feeling I encountered last week during my visit to East Palestine. It’s the same attitude I come across constantly in my rural Pennsylvania homeland. The way the East Palestine disaster has unfolded magnifies the rural perception of government, and both sides of the aisle would be wise to take a closer look and listen.

Cockburn would usually think twice about celebrating a man that’s under his wife’s thumb. But after seeing reports that Kanye West's new wife Bianca Censori “runs the show,” Cockburn can’t help but think that arrangement is probably for the best. The forty-five-year-old disgraced rapper shocked fans last month when he married the Yeezy architectural designer Censori, in a top-secret ceremony just two months after finalizing his divorce from Kim Kardashian. A source told the Sun, "Bianca runs the show. She has been around Ye for about three years, things got serious really fast in mid-November. "Bianca handles Ye's daily logistics from Yeezy clothing management to construction of the new Yeezy headquarters/ Donda Academy.

My brothers and I grew up in a very active household. We were always busy with sports, schoolwork, and chores, and there was a constant revolving door of friends and teammates. Both of my parents worked full-time as business owners and as our informal chauffeurs. Along with thousands of meals to be prepared, loads of laundry to be done, fights to break up, and the occasional window to be replaced, ours was a house that was never quiet, especially when my brothers tapped their illegal fireworks stash. To an outsider, it might have looked like being in the middle of a domesticated Lord of the Flies. But there was a purpose to the madness and chaos. We learned conflict management, independence, fire safety, and the value of hard work and cooperation.

UFC president Dana White’s new show Power Slap: Road to the Title debuted on January 18 to paltry ratings — a reported 295,000 viewers following a helpful lead-in from the pro wrestling show AEW Dynamite, which had nearly a million — and widespread critical outrage due to the seeming inhumanity of the sport. Those who did tune in watched in mute horror as Chris Kennedy was brutally knocked out, his hands curling up in what Chris Nowinski, a former football player and wrestler turned brain trauma researcher, referred to as “fencing posture,” indicative of serious brain injury — then later proved unable to recollect what had happened to him.

Add your tropical dream vacation/work trip/family wedding to the list of lingering Covid consequences. If you’re like me, every time you head to the airport these days, you brace for your flight to be delayed or cancelled. It’s not just in our heads. If it seems that air travel has gotten less reliable since the the pandemic hit, that’s because it has. Reuters reported in August 2022 that “flight cancellations and delays by US airlines in the first seven months of the year have surpassed the comparable 2019 period.” Many of these disruptions were weather-related, but a pilot I spoke to emphasized ongoing airline staffing shortages as the biggest headache at the airport. He told me that heading into 2019, airlines were facing the biggest pilot shortage in history.

On the face of things, there is little in common between Prince Harry and Andrew Tate. Yet look closer and you see two sides of the same coin: a narcissistic version of modern masculinity that warps what's actually important about manhood for the demands of an addicted audience. Tate is a juvenile accused sex trafficker, who believes his right as an HGH-fueled muscle man entitles him to a Conan the Barbarian Romanian fantasy of Bugattis, baby oil and bitches. Harry is a pussy-whipped blue blood who wields his grief gestalt as a weapon against all comers — be they media or monarchy. Tate's narcissism is more aggressive.

Over the last few days, as far as I’m aware, I have been the sole defender of the successful children of the rich. So-called "nepo babies" have been unfairly attacked by the very jealous, mainly middling journalists, who have decided that the greatest crime of these talented few was simply being born. “We love them, we hate them, we disrespect them, we’re obsessed with them,” read Vulture’s front cover, along with a photo illustration of famous progeny. The spawn included Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny and Vanessa Paradis, and Dakota Johnson, whose parents are Melanie Griffiths and Don Johnson. The author of the piece seems to think that the only reason anybody knows the aforementioned names is because of their parents' status and connection.

1922 saw its fair share of shocks in the literary world, among them the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But perhaps the strangest book-related event of the year didn’t involve any writing at all, at least not as performed by human agency. Instead, the author was a ghost. The setting was a darkened room at the Ambassador Hotel in New Jersey’s Atlantic City, where on the warm Sunday afternoon of June 18, 1922, Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame sat down between his wife Jean and the celebrated escapologist Harry Houdini to hold a séance. The first two of these individuals were advocates of spiritualism, the last of them a skeptic.

In the lobby of the Holiday Inn Chantilly, there’s a leak in the ceiling. Next to the pail collecting the drips sits Stormy Daniels, her client and a haunted doll called Susan. This is a normal — and paranormal — afternoon for the world’s most notorious porn star. In the time since her hush-money imbroglio with President Trump, Daniels has dedicated her time to directing porn, making some for her OnlyFans, reality TV show appearances… and the supernatural. Her latest venture sees her reading tarot for clients who book with her online. This is what has brought Cockburn to the fringes of the Exxxotica DC convention. “I usually do these up in the room,” Stormy explains, festively dressed in a red-and-black checked shirt and a snowflake necklace.

There’s a perplexing debate buzzing online about where babies come from, and liberals are highlighting the fundamentally warped way they view human life and relationships. Author Gabrielle Blair is making waves for her groundbreaking discovery that if men stopped ejaculating inside women, we would have fewer unwanted pregnancies and abortions (though Blair, herself a Mormon mother of six, believes “women that want or need an abortion should be able to get one whenever they want or need one”). In promoting her new book, Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think about Abortion, Blair has been advocating for free vasectomies and for a “social campaign that talks about the reality of vasectomies.

Northern Virginia is a wasteland. Twenty or so miles due west of Washington, DC you'll find a series of nondescript neighborhoods, with no distinct identity, no true town centers, a barely broken chain of outlet stores and closed restaurants. The stretch of highway leading from Arlington to Dulles Airport is the urban equivalent of an ellipsis: a “loading” screen of locales. There could be no more suitable place to host the most conventional of conventions. And conventions can be frightfully dull. Cockburn would know: his lengthy tenure with The Spectator has seen him grace the stalls of CPAC, AIPAC, the RNC. He is far too familiar with the jangle of elevator musak, the freebie fridge magnets, the plastic press passes. When it comes to corporate America, he has seen everything.

Madison Cawthorn, the one-hit-wonder congressman from North Carolina who was defeated in his primary earlier this year, used his final address on the House floor yesterday to condemn “soft metrosexuals.” In the spirit of not kicking a guy when he’s down (Cawthorn will be gone by January), let’s cut him some slack and acknowledge that, melodramatic language aside, his speech made a valid point. Social media is to blame, at least in part, for weakening American culture. “America is weak,” Cawthorn declared. “Her sons are sickly, and her daughters are decrepit. Our country now faces the consequences of enabling a participation trophy society. We’re no longer the United States. We’ve become the nanny state.

I’ve often thought that a candid fly-on-the-wall documentary about the production of the Harry Potter films would be considerably more entertaining than any of the lackluster pictures themselves (Alfonso Cuaron’s excellent Prisoner of Azkaban duly excepted). Alan Rickman’s recent diaries suggest that the sets were unhappy, frantic places where actors were seldom allowed to create memorable characters and where the focus on the juvenile performers meant that one of the finest British ensemble casts ever assembled often functioned as little more than expensive set-dressing. Yet more than a decade after the final film, the actors continue to command headlines, some of which is thanks to Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling’s views on the trans issue.

“Why don’t more men take their wives’ last names?” asked the Washington Post in a recent piece about a Maine husband who took his wife’s name. And why is it less common for a woman to keep her existing last name, which accounted for only about 20 percent of marrying women in 2015? Amazingly, even in our progressive era, women are still choosing to assume the names of their husbands. It’s obvious what side WaPo comes down on. Their article quotes an author who labels women taking their husbands' last names “bizarre and anachronistic.” It quotes the mother of another husband who took his wife's name, praising her son’s decision for “subvert[ing] the dominant paradigm.