Commentary Magazine (February 10, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘Power Broke Her’ – The Rise and (Maybe) Fall of Lina Khan; The ‘As A Jew’: A Brief History; What Putin and Xi have in Common; Hostages – What Price is Too High?; On Joan Didion and more…
Lina Khan was pleased with her progress. Appearing before the Economic Club of New York in July 2023, she outlined her vision as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden and its success so far. Never mind the fact that, just days earlier, a federal court had delivered her agency yet another high-profile setback.
The magazine Popular Mechanics, where I once worked, used to have a column called “Saturday Mechanic.” It was a guide to basic car repair for the weekend tinkerer, and its author had decades of experience both in fixing cars and writing about them. Nonetheless, for each column, he would perform the task in question, carefully documenting each step with photographs. It was a lot of work, in other words.
Commentary Magazine (January 17, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘They’re Coming After Us’ – The sense Israelis have that they are personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an extended military invasion than a terrorist blow….
I have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
When I talked with Israelis on a trip in November, the phrase described a gut emotion few under the age of 50 said they had ever experienced—the sense that they were personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an extended military invasion than a terrorist blow. They had lived through years of ineffectual rocket fire that was all but magically extinguished by the Iron Dome and Arrow anti-missile systems.
Israel is resolved to remove Hamas and its terrorist infrastructure from the Gaza Strip permanently, and for much of the world, its determination raises one question more than any other: What comes next in Gaza? For those who disapprove of Israel’s actions in the war or those who either passively or actively support the role of Hamas as the Strip’s governing authority, the lack of answers provides a pretext not only to demand a permanent cease-fire but to suggest (often quietly and with a furrowed brow indicating supposed realpolitik wisdom) that the path Israel seems to be making for itself is a dead end from which it needs to be saved.
In his new book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised,American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis writes about the go-go years of the 1960s: Saturn V rockets were blasting to the moon, atomic power promised to make electricity “too cheap to meter,” and sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek depicted new marvels right around the corner.
“Joseph,” my friend Edward Shils said to me, “we have spoken about many things, among them about various writers, but we are both too civilized ever to talk about Shakespeare. After all, what could one say?” Yes, what can one say? Over a long writing career, I have never written about Shakespeare, and, best I can recall, among the many millions of words I have produced, have never even quoted him. Truth is, I have long admired Shakespeare without being especially nuts about him.
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