IN THE October 19, 2015, ISSUE
Bedeviled
Black Mass, in which a cadaverous Johnny Depp portrays James “Whitey” Bulger, the famous Boston gangster and FBI informant, is the kind of movie that gives competence a bad name. ...
Magazine
Also In This Issue
Articles
Labour’s Leftward Lurch
Since 1974, the British Labour party has had only two types of leader: those who have embarrassed themselves and lost dramatically to the Tories, and Tony Blair. By electing Jeremy ...
Hopelessly Hackable Feds
‘I guess everybody is going to know what kind of porn I like.”
Not something one hears at a lot of business meetings, but the guy had a point: We were ...
Open Borders, Open Coffers
After running a cash register for a few years at a New Jersey grocery store, my brother, who is no policy wonk, observed: “I thought immigrants couldn’t get welfare, yet ...
Hung Up on Israel
At the recent Republican presidential debate, many of the candidates mentioned Israel. Jeb Bush, for example, said that we need to reestablish “our commitment to Israel, which has been altered ...
Features
Trump Wrongs the Right
It’s almost impossible to fathom what an unusual candidate Donald Trump is. Put aside his lack of political experience (except for his serial flirtations with running for president over the ...
Finally, the Recount
Our text today is a pair of classic Buckley quips from the great 1965 vintage. People who remember nothing else about William F. Buckley Jr.’s brief foray into elective politics ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Super K, Revisited
‘Surely no statesman in modern times, and certainly no American secretary of state, has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s monumental biography, ...
FDR in Decline
Jay Winik is a master of the annus magnus school of history, in which the past can best be fathomed and told by ferreting out individual seminal years. During certain ...
Papal Espionage and the Third Reich
In March 1939, throngs descended upon St. Peter’s Square to await the election of the successor to Pope Pius XI. They didn’t have long to wait. In the quickest conclave ...
Violence before Victoria
In this era of orange-suited victims beheaded or buried alive en masse by jihadist fanatics, Michael Knox Beran would like to take us back to an earlier era of shocking ...
Bedeviled
Black Mass, in which a cadaverous Johnny Depp portrays James “Whitey” Bulger, the famous Boston gangster and FBI informant, is the kind of movie that gives competence a bad name. ...
Duskfall
Kids come back to college at the end of August, but night comes back into its own at the end of September, so between freshman orientation and the equinox is ...
Sections
Letters
Crime and Over-punishment
It is surprising that the editors of National Review would publish Stephanos Bibas’s article, which describes at length the harmful social effects of keeping convicted criminals behind bars ...
The Week
‐ The New York City Council honored Ethel Rosenberg. One hundred million people were unavailable for comment.
‐ If Donald Trump stopped insulting people, he would practically be rendered mute, but ...
Gruel, Britannia
Story from the Telegraph: “Meat should be treated like tobacco with a public campaign to stop people eating it, Jeremy Corbyn’s new vegan shadow farming minister Kerry McCarthy has suggested.”
“Shadow” ...
To All the Members of Cell Block H
Greetings!
Although I’m a recent arrival here at the Sybil Brand Women’s Federal Correctional Institution, I like to think that I’ve settled in and made some great and lasting friendships. If ...
Poetry
THE GARDEN
Nothing to do with me,
All that it grows:
Whatever I might see –
A vole, a rose.
Who gives, who takes away?
Look how it grieves,
How what shoots up today
Falls among thieves,
While in ...
Happier Warrior
For most of human existence, the average man could look forward to a relatively short life of chasing game or extracting enough sustenance from the ground that his family could ...