Our World

The casino floor was heaving as gamblers, such as Sally Cresswell, a 57-year-old estate agent from Texas, hit the slots at the Tropicana for one last dance with Lady Luck.

During its heyday in the middle of the last century, the hotel represented the glitz and the glamour of Las Vegas, the casino town that sprung up in the middle of the Nevada desert and was controlled by the mob.

Today you have to listen hard to hear the dying strains of the Rat Pack here, with the gangsters who once called Sin City home long gone. As a vivid illustration of the changing face of Las Vegas, the Tropicana takes some beating.

Over Easter Weekend in 1964, two gangs from opposite sides of the cultural spectrum clashed at Clacton-on-Sea. It would never happen now

“Clacton on Sea,” proclaimed an advert in the Daily Mirror on Easter Saturday, 1964: “Seven Miles of Golden Sands. Beautiful Gardens. Fast Electric Trains from London.” Yet any holidaymakers who made the trip probably wished they had stayed at home, not just because it was the coldest Easter since 1883, but primarily on account of the visiting rival groups of young Londoners whose behaviour dominated the following day’s newspaper headlines.

“‘Wild Ones’ Invade Seaside – 90 Arrests” said the Mirror’s front page, drawing a parallel with the 1953 Marlon Brando biker film, blaming the trouble on “1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring, rampaging teenagers on scooters and motorcycles”.

Progressives are rediscovering old truths about the sexes

Modern revolutions — those we know to have failed — share an impractical conceit. In the minds of their architects, the establishment of a wholly new social contract has meant renovating human nature itself.

France’s revolution, which begat the utopian tradition, was predicated on the assumption that humanity unshackled from superstition and guided by pure reason would enter a new epoch of Enlightenment. That utopian ideal was carried forward by the Paris Commune and, eventually, the Soviets, who sought to erase from the human experience concepts such as property, enterprise, and individuality. Throughout, the revolutionaries’ ambition was matched only by their contempt for the world as it was. Robert Owen, the founder of one similarly ill-fated experiment in utopian design, in America, professed that the social reformer’s goal is to stamp out “that greatest of all errors, the notion that individuals form their own characters.”

It is easy to become somewhat despondent with the apparent condition of the West and of the world generally, but that conclusion is deceptive and unjustified. The war in Ukraine remains a largely unsuccessful act of naked aggression by Russia that has exposed the military of that country as inept and inefficient. Russia has a legitimate historic interest in Ukraine, but as almost the whole world recognized, it had no right to try to subjugate that country, especially having, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, guaranteed the frontiers of Ukraine when it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the USSR. What is needed now is someone of the stature and competence representing an adequately influential jurisdiction, to bring the war to an end on the basis of giving a little to the Russians and securing absolute and ironclad guarantees from Russia and NATO of the revised borders of a sovereign Ukraine.

With home prices so high, living on wheels seems a reasonable alternative. Many find it isn’t.

Siena Juhlin bought a white Ford Transit in August and decided to make it her home. She needed a new place to live, and the idea of traveling full time in a big cargo van sounded like a fairy tale. Soon, she was off, decamping from her waitressing job in Missouri with plans to live off her savings while exploring the West Coast.

That lasted two months. In California, Juhlin’s transmission died. Ever since, she has been working three part-time jobs to regain the $5,000 she had to spend to get it fixed.

It wasn’t exactly the journey she expected—but she still prefers it to her old life as an apartment dweller. “Everything is 10 times harder,” said Juhlin, 23. “But everything is also amazingly beautiful and rewarding.”

When I read that our government despises us, I’m tempted to respond that the feeling is mutual. But as Andrew Breitbart warned, politics is downstream of culture. So there’s a “Picture of Dorian Voter” problem here.

Certainly when a “Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force” study calls us misinformed conspiracy-minded kooks who hate politicians, I want to shake the morning paper at them. On March 25 alone I encountered our finance minister asking senators to pass a money-shredding bill unread. And in addition to $59.5 million to consultants, federal bureaucrats clocked 134,000 hours of their own highly-paid pensionable time on the wretched ArriveCan app

Leading doctors have warned of a mysterious new “epidemic” of abdominal cancers in younger people.

Following the Princess of Wales’s announcement of her diagnosis on Friday, specialist clinicians have said that in recent years they have seen a significant increase in under-45s presenting with cancers typically seen in older patients.

Many are fit and outwardly healthy, prompting a scramble among scientists to establish what is causing the trend.

The Princess of Wales is undergoing treatment for cancer, she has announced in a personal video message, but told the world: “I am going to be ok.”

The Princess is undergoing a course of preventative chemotherapy and has said she is focused on making a “full recovery”.

The cancer was identified during tests after her abdominal surgery on Jan 16, and she began treatment in late February.

Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, has announced that she has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy.pic.twitter.com/zmxtLVpHlu

— Ground News (@Ground_app) March 22, 2024

It wasn’t easy pinning Bari Weiss down for a chat. Despite our fond regard for each other – we are both Jewesses of the same age, both keen on defending Israel in the media – the American journalist and editor was always frenetically busy, as her profile has gone stratospheric since we last met.

When we met in 2021, in a sweltering New York summer, she had half a million Twitter followers and a Substack newsletter (Common Sense) that was rapidly gathering readers and revenue. The previous year, she had resigned from her job as an op-ed editor and writer at the New York Times with a 1,500-word resignation letter that went viral. “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote, accusing the paper of a culture of bullying writers with slightly right-of-woke views.

Think back to the political situation a decade ago, and one may have in mind a calmer, less dysfunctional time. Britain’s economy was growing, just about, and real wages were beginning to rise for the first time since the summer of 2007, even if they remained well below that peak. The steadying influence of Barack Obama in the White House and the Coalition government in Whitehall seems a world away from our current post-Brexit, post-Covid age of geopolitical upheaval and spiralling living costs. Only the looming referendum on Scottish independence seemed then to present any real challenge to the status quo, whether that be viewed as threat or opportunity. Economists speak of a “misery index”, which combines the inflation rate with the unemployment rate. By this measure, economies of the UK and the US were doing well in the spring of 2014. Interest rates remained where they had been since the banking crisis, stuck rigidly below 1%. This was a gift to mortgage-holders, and house prices reflected that.

Kali Gaddie was a college senior when the pandemic abruptly upended her life plans—and made her part of a big and deeply unhappy political force that figures to play a huge role in the 2024 election season.

Her graduation was postponed, she was let go from her college job and her summer internship got canceled. She spent the final months of school taking online classes from her parents’ house. “You would think that there’s a plan B or a safety net,” she said. “But there’s actually not.”

Today, Gaddie, 25, works as an office manager in Atlanta earning less than $35,000 a year. In her spare time, she uploads videos to TikTok, where she’s amassed thousands of followers. Now, that’s at risk of being taken away too. All of this has left her dejected and increasingly skeptical of politicians.

The success of the film Oppenheimer has shone a spotlight on the work done by scientists in New Mexico as they developed the first nuclear bomb. But 80 years later, some local people say their story remains untold.

“Both my great grandfathers had cancer, my two grandmothers had cancer, my father had three different cancers, my sister has cancer,” Tina Cordova says mournfully as she flicks through an old family photo album in her living room.

“I’ve lost count of the aunts and uncles and cousins who’ve had cancer. And my family is not unique.”

“We hired a helicopter, we got hold of a sniper rifle, we shot radioactive wolves…” Writers at loaded magazine used to pride themselves on their wild gonzo journalism and madcap antics. It was, as founding editor James Brown described it, Arena edited by Hunter S. Thompson. The lines between the reporter and the reported were deliberately blurred, with the writer’s stimulant-fuelled mishaps often being the main event.

A decade on, Channel 4’s poverty safari is still taking its toll

James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham, renamed Benefits Street by Channel 4 in 2014, was originally christened Osborne Street, and this makes me laugh. With its cast of depressives and drug addicts, fed and clothed by the state, and living in semi-affable chaos, Benefits Street, which posed as social commentary, did more to sell George Osborne’s policy of Austerity than anything. What could be done with such useless people but tax their spare rooms and cut their child benefit? It was cruel but effective television: a legendarium of the underclass. Benefits Street was a very partial study of poverty, and worthless for it.

At the end of October, London Magazine hosted a conservatively minded gathering called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Inspired and started by world-renowned professor Jordan Peterson, this conference-styled event aimed at giving voice to those thinking about saving and strengthening Judeo-Christian civilization instead of letting it slide into a controlled decline amidst postcolonial guilt and moral relativism. About 1,500 people, mostly from Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, were invited to share ideas and start building an international community. Legacy media nicknamed it AntiDavos and, maybe, rightly so. Time will tell if it can live up to that designation. Yet the challenges that created the dire need for such an alliance are here and ever-present. Vytautas Sinica from Lithuania sat down with Dr. Peterson to talk about the troubling effect of ideologies, cultural Marxism in particular, and the unique role that might be awaiting Eastern Central Europe in the culture war ahead.