Laryngitis
Finally! My first week without travel in a long time–a chance to catch up on work around the office, enjoy relaxed conversations with colleagues about the state of the world, and get summer reading recommendations from Phil Terzian, new cocktail recipes from Vic Matus, and analysis of the baseball season so far from Lee Smith and Terry Eastland. So, needless to say, I came down with a summer head cold which became an unpleasant cough and then a case of laryngitis by mid-week.
So I spent Thursday and Friday at home, writing my editorial Thursday morning at our kitchen table (where I do my best thinking, such as it is), and badgering my colleagues with all kinds of queries and suggestions by phone and email. It really is true, with modern communications, you don’t have to be there physically to be in constant touch. I did get the sense that Richard Starr, Mike Warren and others may have thought I was in too constant touch when they started somehow inadvertently missing my calls or not noticing my emails, with Richard finally gently reminding me at 7:00 p.m. Thursday that we did have a magazine to produce and that the time for clever headline ideas and illustrations had passed.
In any case, the days at home had their desired effect and I seem to be getting better. And it was a fun week (the part of it that I participated in) anyway. The party on our rooftop celebrating our 1,000th issue seemed to be a big success, and since no one can hear you in those kinds of mob scenes anyway, not having much of a voice didn’t matter–I just nodded a lot and mouthed agreement to whatever friends, associates and various D.C. poobahs were saying. Sen. Ben Sasse, with wife and kids back home in Nebraska, seemed to welcome a chance to mix and mingle with non-Senators (I hope I don’t get him in trouble for saying this), and spent a couple of hours there talking with everyone from Bret Baier to various interns. The weather was beautiful, the mood was good, and we put Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton out of our collective minds for an evening.
And I’ve only heard from one longtime friend, also a friend of the magazine, who somehow wasn’t on the invitation list and (rightly) thought he should have been. I of course blamed errant subordinates for an inexcusable lapse, and assured him heads would roll…
Of course, in retrospect all the chatting probably wasn’t good for my voice, which was pretty much gone by Wednesday morning. I made it through the annual Bradley Prizes event Wednesday night, with a particularly strong crop of honorees this year–Charles Murray, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Andrew Roberts and Gary Sinise–did some more nodding and mouthing at the reception, and spent the rest of the week at home.
And you won’t be surprised that in my (sort-of) absence, Richard & Co. produced a strong issue, with an important think piece by Chris DeMuth on the administrative state, a thoughtful (and worrisome) report from Tom Joscelyn on Omar Mateen and the FBI, an excellent review by James Gardner of what Susan confirms is a terrific exhibition of Hellenistic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which goes through mid-July and which I hope I can get to early in the month, and much more! And Mike Warren, in his first week of directing the website, filling the needless-to-say unfillable shoes of Daniel Halper (who accepted an offer to become D.C. bureau chief of the New York Post), had lots of good web content up, including a much-noted piece by Virginia Hume on “Donald Trump and the Art of Seduction,” well-worth reading.
And as my laryngitis ebbs, I’ve discovered one thing: It’s a good excuse for declining invitations that otherwise I’m too inclined to accept. So I may just let the impression that I can barely talk linger for a couple more weeks….Total honesty is not always the absolutely best policy.
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Moving On Up
Daniel Halper isn’t the first TWS staffer to leave for important positions at other journalistic outlets–and indeed, one of the functions of a small magazine, one of the ways it indirectly has influence, is by populating the higher ranks of other magazines and newspapers. So from David Brooks at the New York Times to John Podhoretz at Commentary, from Robert Messenger at the Wall Street Journal to Jay Nordlinger at National Review, we’re proud that our alumni have, on the whole, done well and are making contributions in the spirit of The Weekly Standard, if I can put it that way, while no longer at The Weekly Standard.
And so we were all thrilled this week when it was announced that our friend Katherine Mangu-Ward, who started out at TWS almost a decade ago (hard to believe it’s that long!), had been selected as the new editor of Reason magazine. Katherine was our token libertarian on staff for a year or two, and was the recipient (as well as the generator) of a fair amount of good-natured ideological jousting. In an interview this week with James Warren that I think you’ll enjoy reading, she reminisced about her time at TWS:
There’s probably more libertarian sentiment than many might think among the neocon rank-and-file, but I was always a visitor to those shores. When it came time to do a profile of a young Paul Ryan, though, I had no problem being Fred Barnes’ Gal Friday, and I learned a lot about how to cover Washington from those guys.
Richard Starr and I believe that the encounter Katherine remembers, culminating in my little snort, was about private money rather than heroin legalization…but who knows? Anyway, congratulations to Katherine, she’ll do a great job, and for what it’s worth, I do find myself making common cause more than I once might have expected with libertarians against the threat of the nanny state and the modern left’s casual disregard for freedom. What did Tocqueville write? “I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.”
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Garry Kasparov (again)
The Foundation for Constitutional Government has released another conversation with former world chess champion and democracy activist Garry Kasparov on Conversations with Bill Kristol. We decided to do this conversation a couple of weeks ago, and release it quickly, because I’d found Garry’s thoughts (expressed off camera at the previous Conversation) about the significance of the 2016 Presidential race, so interesting. Kasparov argues in particular that many of us are underestimating the significance of the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders candidacies, and therefore don’t have enough of a sense of urgency about what must be done. I find his arguments pretty persuasive and think you might too. And at the end, I ask (on the spur of the moment) what book had influenced him the most as he educated himself on matters of politics and history; I think you’ll be interested (as I was) by his answer.
So take a watch when you have time (which you should, now that the basketball playoffs have finally (!) ended. And to view the other conversations that have been previously posted, including the first two with Kasparov, click here.
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Hitler Reacts To…
You’re probably familiar with the thousands of parody-subtitled videos, generated from all corners of the internet, based on a climactic scene from Der Untergang (2004), a German drama on the last days of Adolf Hitler. I’ve laughed countless times over the years at the various anachronistically subtitled videos of Hitler getting upset over relevant current events, either trivial or momentous. You can take a look at some classics here and here. But here’s one that’s relevant to the current moment and to intra-conservative debates about Donald Trump. LOL, as the kids say.
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Onward!
Bill Kristol
