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I have been wondering for quite a while about the absence of Mark Steyn on the Tucker Carlson show. I always made it a point to watch him on his regular Thursday evening visit. Does anyone know why he isn't on the show any longer?

Welcome to another presentation from our Serenade Radio series of Steyn's Song of the Week. On the eve of Valentine's Day we tell the story of one of the classic love songs, one that over the decades has itself become one of those fundamental things that apply as time goes by. To listen to the show, simply click above.

As I write, five persons are dead and over forty injured at the Waukesha Christmas Parade - a strange sentence to find oneself putting down in print. The injured include dozens of children, and the dead number members of Milwaukee's Dancing Grannies. Waukesha is a town of about 70,000 about fifty miles from the world-famous Kenosha.I switched on CNN this morning to find out the latest, and they weren't covering the story. So I take it the facts are not helpful to "the narrative". Is it in The New York Times? Why, yes, on page 22:SUV Plows into ParadeThese sick...

Tuesday is what less evolved societies than Virginia still quaintly call "Election Day". The Democrat candidate, the unlovely Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, claims that "we are substantially leading on the early vote". In the fullness of time he will also be substantially leading on the late vote, if he isn't already. That leaves the votes on Voting Day up for grabs. The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not...

Who do you think should have replaced RUSH???

A decade and a half back, the late Christopher Hitchens was talking to the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and brought up my demographic-death-spiral thesis from America Alone. Hitch wanted to know whether, when the PM got together with the Continental bigwigs, it was part of "the European conversation". Tone replied that it was part of "the subterranean conversation". By which he meant that nice house-trained EU prime ministers hadn't figured out a way to raise such subjects in public without being damned as racists and becoming electorally unviable, at least anywhere west of the Landstraße, to modify Metternich....

A month from now, America will be marking the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The observances will be muted here, because it's too sad: we've lost the war, as the present recreation of the Saigon embassy evacuation in Kabul reminds us, somewhat crudely and obviously. Instead, ahead of that grim date, I thought we'd revisit August 2001 with a few columns of mine from that last summer. As a scene-setter, we began a week ago with the summer of sharks. Here, from The Sunday Telegraph of August 6th 2001, is a column on Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam -...

Kurt Westergaard and I were successive winners of the Danish Free Press Society's Sappho Award. I was very flattered to find myself in his company, but couldn't honestly say I deserved to be. Kurt was one of the bravest men of our time - not because he was inclined to bravery, but simply because, when it was required, he met the challenge and never backed down. Sixteen years ago Flemming Rose of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to conduct a thought experiment in public after an author casually revealed that he couldn't find any Danish artist willing to illustrate his...

Bo Snerdley / James Golden: Mark Steyn Interview | 7-3-21

This month we are marking the centenary of Nelson Riddle, perhaps the greatest of all arrangers of popular song. That's what Frank Sinatra thought, and we cite "I've Got the World on a String", "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" as merely the obvious examples. This week's selection is less frequently cited, but is a particular favorite of mine. On March 27th 1929 the Charles B Cochran revue Wake Up And Dream opened at the London Pavilion, with a host of West End talent, including Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale, Tilly Losch...

We are in a literally Orwellian world now. Until a couple of days ago the headline on this Washington Post story from February 2020 read:Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked. Now it reads:Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.Democracy dies in darkness, but stealth editing thrives there. That's Orwell 101 - although one assumes whichever of Bezos's woeful hacks was ordered to do it was unaware of his literary antecedents, or self-respect would have required him to seek alternative, less pitiful employment. Nevertheless, as you'll know if you heard...

This month we are marking the centenary of Nelson Riddle, perhaps the greatest of all arrangers of popular song. That's what Frank Sinatra thought, and we cite "I've Got the World on a String" and "I've Got You Under My Skin" as merely the obvious examples. But Sinatra and Riddle rescued a lot of other songs over the years - songs that had once been hits and then been forgotten, songs that had been in hit shows but no one had noticed, songs that had been in the stage version but dropped for the movie adaptation... But they rarely transformed...

I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin....

Photo via Gage SkidmoreAs we’ve reported on several recent occasions, the liberal media’s onslaught against Fox News host Tucker Carlson continues at full throttle as the left’s attempt to rid the airwaves of its most-feared — and fearless — enemy rolls on; an effort unequaled in recent times.Sure, CNN went after Sean Hannity every now and then during the Trump administration, but Hannity lacks the depth of insight and foresight, critical thinking capabilities, and intellectual chops of Tucker Carlson, not to mention Hannity served as the hood ornament of the Trump fan bus every night without for fail for more...

Larry McMurtry died this past week, in the small town where he was born and spent almost all his life - Archer City, Texas, where his greatest film was partly shot. He was principally a novelist, but Hollywood came a-callin' early, turning his very first book into an effective vehicle for Paul Newman, Hud (1963). It wasn't long before McMurtry was being asked to do his own adaptations of his novels, and by the time of the telly version of Lonesome Dove he was a bona fide famous screenwriter. His blockbuster was Terms of Endearment (1983), which Kathy Shaidle wrote...

One of the glummer aspects of advancing years is seeing all your more whimsical jokes become literally true. So it has now been announced that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be writing a "thriller". Plot spoiler: It was Putin. With the Macedonian Content Farmers. In a $100,000 Facebook ad. Well, no. It will surely be a little more thrilling than that. Mrs Clinton will be collaborating with Louise Penny, who writes (to me not entirely persuasive) police procedurals set in Quebec's Eastern Townships, a short tootle north of me, if you can get across the shuttered border. If I'd known Hillary...

Happy Presidents' Day - or Presidents Day (the style is variable) - to all our American readers. You can find our two-part forty-five-song Presidential Medley here and here. Usually, after the mostly-peaceful peaceful transfer of power, I update our special to take account of the new guy - in this case, the purported forty-sixth. But for some reason, this time round, I just thought, aw, screw it. ~As I've been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies: Covid-19 originated in bats or pangolins. New York did a way better job of handling it than Florida,...

Happy Australia Day to all our readers Down Under. The national holiday is, in fact, on Tuesday, but for all I know it's already Tuesday there, or possibly Wednesday, in which case Happy Australia Day for yesterday - or, as the depraved nutters at the nation's state broadcaster say, "Happy Invasion Day". Not being able to visit the Lucky Country is one of the things I've most missed in this last year of lockdown, but I hope to see it once more before I die, if the Vegemite Curtain is ever lifted. As you know, we always like to have...

I leave it to readers to decide whether this week's Song of the Week was selected as a plea for healing in a divided land or merely because sixty years ago - January 1960 - it was on the Billboard Number One album. The latter is verifiable, although to be precise one should clarify that it was on the Billboard Number One stereo album; the Number One mono album was the soundtrack to the Elvis film GI Blues. As to the healing balm, you'll have to hang on till our closing paragraph. The stereo album in question was Frank Sinatra's...

As I said earlier, I find myself at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class in my reaction to the "storming" of the US Capitol. As I put it: The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours yesterday they weren't. In a self-governing republic of citizen-legislators, that ought to be sobering and instructive. But, of course, it wasn't. Still, I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about...