When Surrender Is an Option

Presidential speechwriter and journalist Jonathan Horn, author of books on George Washington’s latter years in the 18th century and Confederate general Robert E. Lee in the 19th century, explores the 20th century with his latest work on the entwined lives of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright. It was their destiny to preside over the greatest defeat in U.S. military history in the Philippines as the United States was thrust into World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

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Decline Absolution: Sympathetic, Well-Meaning Journalists With Poor Integrity

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are going to make a lot of money from their new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Some people find this aggravating, and for good reason. The vast majority of Americans (86 percent as of February 2024) used common sense to arrive at the correct conclusion long before the 81-year-old president shuffled on stage and bragged about beating Medicare. Biden was cognitively and physically unfit to serve another term in office. No shit. He was arguably unfit to serve at all. The scandal played out in plain sight, fueled by Democrats and mainstream journalists doing what they do best: scolding the American people for having the wrong opinions.

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Getting the Revolution Right

We have now reached the cusp of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and speaking as a veteran of the 1976 Bicentennial, the word that comes most readily to mind for the celebrations 50 years later is flaccid. The excuse which usually follows is that we live today in a sea of political hatred, retribution, and instability, which makes it hard to celebrate the events that made it all possible.

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Gunning for Results

Jens Ludwig is an economist who’s seen some things. A longtime gun-violence researcher who directs the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, he’s accompanied cops to murder scenes and on high-speed chases. America’s efforts to control gun violence, he argues in Unforgiving Places, are coming up short. Liberals’ focus on "root causes" and conservatives’ support for incarceration both seek to shape the deeper incentives surrounding violence—and to incapacitate violent people, in prison’s case. These approaches have their uses, but they fail to capitalize on an important detail about how violence tends to happen.

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He Was a Dandy, Alright

If you happened to have toiled in the rarefied world of New York magazine publishing at the turn of this century—a world of fax machines, cosmopolitans, iPods, and $700 rents—you could not possibly have escaped the name Graydon Carter. For 25 years, Mr. Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a publishing money mill that employed 150 staff turning out monthly issues that ran up to 400 pages and charged high-end merchants like Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and Aston Martin as much as $100,000 per advertising page. Carter, or simply "Graydon"—apex editors like "Tina" and "Jann" needed only one name back then—now gives us details of his rise to the top in a memoir, When the Going was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. It is a zesty blend of score settling, heartfelt gratitude, apologies, editorial heroics, reflections on family, friendship, design, travel tips, and the many uses for a pocket handkerchief (seriously) served in a martini glass with a Day-Glo swizzle stick. As Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s gossip goddess of that golden age, would say, only in New York, kids, only in New York.

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Ross Douthat and the New Theism

Twenty years after the new atheism coursed triumphantly across the West, its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar is upon us. No less than Deity-denier Richard Dawkins marked the transmutation last year, via a viral video in which he called himself a hymn-and-small-c-church-loving "cultural Christian." That secular confession tracks with broader reality. God may not exactly be back—the decline in both churchgoing, and church-knowing, trudges on. But tempo, that great imponderable, seems uncannily aligned on the side of the faithful these days, at least in the United States.

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The Costs and Consequences of Sexual Liberation

Is there anything left to say about the sexual revolution?

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Just Say Yes?

“We’re here! We’re high! Get used to it!” This was what Garth Mullins’s girlfriend was yelling at a protest in the late 1990s in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mullins—who was, at the time, trying to “keep a low profile,” which “isn’t easy for a six-foot-four albino with a hollering girlfriend”—describes this moment as a turning point. He went from someone who saw “heroin as a medication, not an entire identity,” to someone who wanted to lead a movement for the decriminalization of drugs. The chant, Mullins writes in his book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, “had broken the tension, and people laughed. One by one, then en masse, we took the street. It felt amazing—a legion of drug users—not embarrassed or ashamed, but proudly marching and chanting slogans.”

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Pocahontas 2.0

"What I didn't like about becoming famous overnight," Mallory McMorrow writes in her new book Hate Won't Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It, "is that you might assume that I had always done this, that somehow it came naturally."

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Weekend Beacon 5/4/25

It's been a rollercoaster of a ride, to say the least. Many of us wondered if the chaos and uncertainty would ever end. But it did. At long last, Shedeur Sanders was finally drafted in the fifth round by the Cleveland Browns. Not that I was worried—after all, every dog has his day.

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