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Pop quiz: What's the most important thing about opera singer Luciano Pavarotti? (A) He used his vocal gifts to bring joy to millions; or (B) He was white, and not black or Latino. If you're a normal person, you'd choose option A. But if you're the New York Times chief classical music critic, Tony Tommasini (or some other equally lousy person), you choose B. Tommasini last week published what might be the single worst arts piece ever published by the formerly revered, now auto-cannibalizing Gray Lady. And since I have no word limit on this column, I might as well...

There's too much chatter about movies that are "so bad, they're good." These admittedly amusing musings distract from a truly insidious phenomenon: Movies "so good, they're bad." No such creature as "just a movie" exists. We may (believe ourselves to) be capable of separating fact from fiction, but millions of people never will. Take the "Hitler's Pope" canard. It was popularized by, of all things, a Soviet-orchestrated stage play called The Deputy, back in 1963. How many individuals have heard of this play, let alone seen it performed? A few thousand? Yet the Vatican's supposed collusion with the Nazis is...

Linda Tripp died yesterday, Wednesday - not of the Coronavirus, but of pancreatic cancer apparently diagnosed only last week. Without Ms Tripp's decision to tape surreptitiously her conversations with a certain Pentagon colleague, there would have been no Clinton second-term scandal, no little blue dress for the FBI crime lab, no impeachment... She was a not unattractive woman, but the left is unforgiving to those who refuse to overlook their heroes' pathologies (as we're currently seeing with Joe Biden's accuser), so Linda was turned into the pantomime dame of the cast: "Saturday Night Live" hired John Goodman to play her...

Well, I've resisted the obvious for the last two or three weeks, mainly because, as with "Kung Flu Fighting", I had some previous history with it. In the case of "Kung Fu Fighting", I've been using it as a somewhat improbable free-speech anthem for a decade or so; in the case of this song, I managed to turn it into the sub-title to a bestseller on demographic doom: It's The End Of The World As We Know It It's The End Of The World As We Know It It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I...

Mark is feeling a little under the weather today, so in lieu of a brand new Song of the Week we thought we'd re-publish his thoughts on a boffo global hit of the Sixties. This essay first appeared a little over two years ago to mark the passing of Mel Tillis. We reprise it now to mark the passing of Kenny Rogers. This story starts with Mel and ends with Kenny, the man who gave Mel's song its most perfect expression: The Vietnam War cast, as they say, long shadows. It left, as they also say, deep scars in the...

To modify T S Eliot in "The Hollow Men" (whose theme seems not inappropriate), this is the way the world ends, not with a Bern but a whimper. As I said on Rush the morning after Super Tuesday, Senator Sanders blew the 2016 election with a single line - his crotchetty insistence to Mrs Clinton that he was "sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails". That told Hillary that he wouldn't go after her on the subject of her corruption and lawlessness. Which in turn told Hillary that Bernie wasn't serious. And so it proved. Four years later,...

Before Sleepy Joe's Super Tuesday and COVID-19's super-spreaders and the super-virus's increasing proximity to the super Supreme Leader and all the other stuff that will afflict us this coming week, a Monday miscellany of items that may not have caught your eye: ~From our Abbahu Akbar files, as Laura Rosen Cohen would say: For over a decade, I've been saying that we've been living through an extraordinary moment in human history - the conscious self-extinction of some of the oldest nations on the planet. Also for over a decade, I've been saying that if I had to pick a Continental...

Proximity is all. If they can't get to you, they can't get you. Most of us locate our fears on the far horizon – like the old maps where the known world dribbles away and the cartographer scrawls "Here be dragons". Sometimes, as Lincoln learned, the problem's right there standing next to you. In a globalized economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about rapacious First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalization cuts both ways, and the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the metropolis -...

I've taken a lot of flack here on FR for the past few weeks claiming that Buttigieg and his former employer McKinsey & Company were CIA. Mark Stein is filling in for Tucker Carlson and just spent the first ten minutes of the show talking about this.

...it's already been put to the people - and the people voted to leave. At which point the losing side took the people to court, whose modish Blairite pseudo-Americanized judges ruled that only Parliament could effect withdrawal from the European Union and so, rather than putting it to the people, it had to be put to the politicians. Hence the last three years of obstruction and subversion. The lady in question, Miss Ria Cooper, was contacted by a gentleman on the Internet who wished to film himself having sex with her and sell the resulting cinematic masterpiece. He subsequently found...

A week ago I was having a conversation in the Fox News green room about the Downton Abbey movie with ...well, go on, guess: Tucker? Kilmeade? No, it was Tyrus. A hulking ex-professional wrestler who could crush the average effete English earl between his toes doesn't seem the most obvious fan of Downton's doings, and we disagreed on Lady Mary, for whom he has an intense loathing and to whose icy bitchery I've warmed up over the years. But it does suggest the broad appeal of Julian Fellowes' "franchise", and helps explain why, franchise-wise, Downton Abbey clobbered the latest Rambo...

I am no fan of Quentin Tarantino, having dubbed him "the Mantovani of mayhem" and endured the reactions of an outraged comments section that in turn dismissed me as a squaresville snob out of touch with flyover country (of which Mr Tarantino would seem an unlikely avatar). Still I do my best: My boys wanted to see The Hateful Eight, so I dutifully tagged along and fell asleep for a good forty minutes of its three-hour length. And in the four years since I have never felt the least inclined to see what I missed. To be honest, I also...

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the release of North by Northwest. Here's what Mark had to say about this classic film a few years ago: Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest contains what I think of as the all-time great strangers-on-a-train scene, and one I always recall if I'm in the dining car of an at least potentially exotic choo-choo - the Eurostar, say - and a glamorous femme comes sashaying down the aisle, even if she does park herself at some other guy's table. In a lifetime's travel, everyone should have a North by Northwest moment: on a...

Mark Steyn's live show on now at https://www.steynonline.com/9733/live-around-the-planet-friday-september-13th Enjoy!

On the eve of the annual 9/11 observances, America's National Security Advisor John Bolton was either fired (per Trump) or resigned (per Bolton). The dispute is being portrayed as one between a Bush-era neocon and an "America First" Trump. But that is something of an over-simplification. As I wrote upon Bolton's appointment a year and a half ago: Bolton is viewed with suspicion as a 'neocon', which is not a term of much practical use these days. But then so was his predecessor - H R McMaster. So the substitution might be of no more significance than a neocon whom...

Mark Steyn Cracks Tucker Carlson Up Talking About Joe Biden Telling Lies

Good Morning/Afternoon,MEGAWELCOMEBACKRUSHDITTOS!

The term "midlife crisis" was coined by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1965. The English language somehow made do without that phrase for the previous six hundred years, yet today, could we get along without it? In 1900, the average American male life expectancy was 47. In 1965, it was 67. An additional two decades of existence: More time to ruminate about your time running out. In this as in so many instances, art preceded (social) science: The then-nameless male midlife crisis had been explored before, through farce (1955's The Seven Year Itch), then high-brow literature (John Cheever's classic 1964 story...

Despite America's improving economic state as of late, a new study suggests millennials are not weaning themselves off of their parents' money particularly well – or at all. According to the poll, 46 per cent of millennials (that's anyone born between 1981 and 1996 typically) "admitted their parents help them with basic costs like their cell phone bill, their groceries, and their rent." Similarly, 48 per cent said their parents were their first stop for financial support above a bank loan or savings.

A few months ago I observed to Tucker Carlson that the difference between "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" was that the former was largely contained to a visceral loathing for the President himself, whereas the latter has been extended to anyone who voted for him - ie, the half of the electorate comprised of "racists", "fascists" and "white supremacists". Now TDS rampages on, to consume half the Democrats, too. Say what you like about Nancy Pelosi, but she took back the House by running the Dems as a "moderate" party that talked about things like voter concern over...