Republican congressmen almost coming to blows on the House floor last week. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty |
America's topsy-turvy politics |
America is experiencing a political age we might call "the Great Inversion", says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Virtually everything, from voting trends to the parties' main values, has flipped. The "most consequential" switch is in each party's approach to governing. For decades, the left was more concerned with "ideological purism" than the "compromise-tainted business of actually governing". As the satirist Will Rogers put it: "I'm not a member of any organised political party. I'm a Democrat." The Republicans, meanwhile, favoured "pragmatism over purity", ruling by the dictum: "Damn your principles. Stick to your party!" It's no coincidence that Republican presidents held power for 28 of the 40 years between 1953 and 1993. |
Yet today's Democrats are "the most ruthlessly organised and efficient" political entity in the world – "and I include the Chinese Communist Party". They won only the narrowest of victories in 2020, yet still managed to enact "one of the most ambitious agendas of any government in recent history": trillions of dollars in new government spending and a massively accelerated green programme. Meanwhile, the Republicans have embarked on an "orgy of self-mutilation". Take the circus around the House Speaker vote: despite his party holding a majority in the House, it took GOP leader Kevin McCarthy 15 attempts to secure the position, as petulant ideologues repeatedly refused to toe the party line. Republicans need to sort themselves out. As the Democrats have realised, elections aren't won by parties that prioritise "internal purification" over getting stuff done. |
Villains Ships, which are disrupting the sex lives of crabs. The constant thrum of engines really spoils the mood for the amorous invertebrates, according to an innovative new study from the University of Derby, in which researchers presented male crabs with yellow sponges doused in sex pheromones to simulate randy lady crustaceans. Previous research had focused only on larger oceanic species, such as whales, author Kara Rising tells Hakai Magazine. "But the poor little crabs need to have sex, too." |
Hero Eric Finkelstein, a 34-year-old American who broke the record for visiting the most Michelin-starred restaurants in 24 hours. The speedy gourmand managed 18 locations when he embarked on the culinary odyssey in New York last October, with dishes ranging from oysters to chawanmushi, a savoury Japanese egg custard. The bill wasn't too bad: $494 before taxes and tips. |
Villain A greedy seal in Essex's Rochford Reservoir, which has been happily munching fish reserved for anglers. Since it was spotted almost a month ago – having likely swum in via an inlet – the pinniped has evaded multiple attempts at capture, including slipping under the net of the local wildlife team last week. As one marine expert tells The Guardian, it's as if "it's found itself in a branch of Waitrose". |
Villain Francis Drake, who the BBC described as a "16th-century slave trader" in an article about a primary school's decision to cast off his name. It's true, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph: in his youth, Drake took part in three slave-trading expeditions in West Africa. But it's hardly what he was best known for. The sailor also circumnavigated the globe, and then there's the small matter of him defeating the Spanish Armada, thus saving England "from being crushed by a bloodthirsty foreign power". |
Hero Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's former technology correspondent, for not letting Parkinson's disease spoil his sense of humour. The 64-year-old has formed a dining club for fellow sufferers, including former colleagues Mark Mardell and Jeremy Paxman, and they're thinking of launching a podcast called Movers and Shakers. |
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THE COUNTRY HOUSE This Georgian family home, Tillyfour House, sits in six acres of grounds and gardens in rural Aberdeenshire. It has a wealth of period features, including ceiling cornices, timber floors and marble mantelpieces. Of particular note is the bright and spacious dual-aspect drawing room in the west wing, which was built ahead of Queen Victoria's visit to Tillyfour in 1868. The small town of Alford is a 12-minute drive; Aberdeen is 45 minutes away. £875,000. |
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Ten years to go: Ezekiel Emanuel. American Philosophical Society |
Ezekiel Emanuel is a powerful figure in American healthcare, says Helen Rumbelow in The Times: he was an architect of Obamacare and has worked for two presidents, Obama and Biden. But he is best known for an essay entitled: "Why I want to die at 75." When the oncologist reaches that age – he is 65 now – he will seek no cure for ailments he develops. No chemotherapy, no surgery, no statins or stents. No antibiotics, even. Rather than endure a "decade of medically extended multiple illnesses", he wants to be "carried off the old-fashioned way, by nature's mercifully swift brutality". |
Zeke, as he is known, thinks this is perfectly rational. Not only will he avoid what is statistically likely to be years of suffering, society won't have the hassle of looking after him. He scorns the Silicon Valley types trying to develop ways of living forever – "these people think the world will collapse if they're not here" – and opposes euthanasia. When people cite the example of "super-agers" such as 80-year-old Joe Biden, he retorts that they are outliers – and "we can't all be outliers". The biggest obstacle to his approach may be his partner, who somewhat understandably "disagrees with his plan". Will he bow to her request to at least consider preventative medicine, such as vaccines? "We are in discussions." |
☎️💀 Emanuel belongs to "what must be one of the most successful sibling groups this side of the Bee Gees". One brother, Rahm, was Barack Obama's chief of staff and later the mayor of Chicago; the other, Ari, runs one of the most powerful Hollywood agencies. On Zeke's birthday, he says, they ring him up and ask: "How many more years is it again that I have to put up with you?" |
In the dead of winter 1978, says Thrillist, "two drunk guys" at the Southfork Saloon in Martin City, Montana had an idea. One challenged the other to make it down the main drag "on a barstool on skis". The only rule was that he had to cross the finish line "in the drinking position". So one of the guys "screwed some skis to a barstool" and set off down the steep 750ft hill. Today their legend is honoured in the annual Barstool Ski Race, which last year attracted 8,000 entrants. Most competitors stick to the barstool-on-skis rubric, but there's also an "open" category which allows "anything on skis". It's "usually something in a reclined position", says event organiser Ben Shafer. "A 10-foot-long steel Budweiser bottle won a couple times." |
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"He does the work. I do the clean-up. Then we fight." |
Robert Caro's "multi-volume, still unfinished" biography of Lyndon B Johnson has taken over 40 years to write and covers more than 3,000 pages, says Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic. And every one of those pages has been edited, in minute detail, by one man: Robert Gottlieb. Their method hasn't changed in decades: Caro, 87, writes his drafts out by pen and then uses his Smith Corona typewriter to copy them out; Gottlieb, 91, makes his marks with a pencil. They bicker "all the time", over every comma, full stop and semicolon. "Actually, don't even get them started on semicolons." As Gottlieb says in the new documentary Turn Every Page, semicolons are the source of an ongoing "civil war". |
One of the pair's first jobs together was trimming The Power Broker, Caro's biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, "from an insane 1,050,000 words to a still pretty insane 700,000". Both men remember the process as a "gruelling year-long combat". Another struggle, over whether to cut a "long section on the history of grass" from the first Johnson volume, is described by Caro as "a tremendous battle, an angry, angry battle". (He lost it.) Other fights have been over individual words: "the verb 'loom' is a sore point". The two men are "set in their ways" – but they're also perfectionists. As Gottlieb says: "He does the work. I do the clean-up. Then we fight." |
Decades-old digital cameras are Gen Z's new favourite gadget, says The New York Times. Teenagers love their slightly blurry, over-lit photos, and are following A-listers like Kylie Jenner and Bella Hadid in posting their poor-quality pictures on Instagram. On eBay, demand for "point-and-shoot" models jumped 10% last year, with searches for uber-aesthetic Nikon COOLPIX cameras (above) soaring by 90%. It's not just the grainy, over-exposed snaps: for many, digital cameras are a way to capture memories without being shackled to their smartphones. "I feel like we're becoming a bit too techy," says one nostalgic snapper. "To go back in time is just a great idea." |
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"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
GK Chesterton |
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