New home for his writing, and to launch a video podcast
The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22 years.
In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace. He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” “Confessions of a Republican Exile,” and “How the Ivy League Broke America.”
The singer’s Super Bowl Halftime Show showed that, regardless of any particular flag, artistic sensitivity is Latin culture’s true identity
For twenty years, I taught a course on Latin American political thought. Bad Bunny may have taught many of the same ideas in ten minutes to millions of people in Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show.
To the untrained ear or eye, the show may have appeared as incongruous gibberish, especially to those of us over 50 who don’t really listen to contemporary urban latin music, especially reggaeton.
But that is besides the point. What really matters are the ideas behind the spectacle.
The show took place in the middle of the United States’ best-known yearly bellicose event, the Super Bowl. Every year, a miniature war takes place between two teams in a sport that even president Trump called a misnomer, “American football,” when comparing it to “football” — or fútbol, in Spanish — which is played with feet and a round ball.
An egg-shaped ball is thrown around or carried with the hands to gain territory with brutal force. This show of violence was interrupted by someone who just wants to dance.
Right now, winter is roaring in the Northern Hemisphere. In Washington, DC, the Potomac river is gelid. In northern Italy, the winter Olympics are taking place after mass protests, while cold winds blow over upheavals in Minneapolis.
Maybe Hell has frozen over. But the singer, real name Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, who had already protested the U.S.’ immigration crackdown at the Grammys, once again said no to ice — in more ways than one — and chose the sun of his native Puerto Rico.
What is the significance of Bad Bunny’s show? It is a break, literally and figuratively, from this long political winter.
For Mexican political philosopher José Vasconcelos, who lived many years as an immigrant in Texas, aesthetics trumps politics. His posited that Latin people, from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Northern California, are united by a common essential rhythm.
Latin culture is fundamentally an artistic sensibility. We may not all share Benito’s particular kind of beat, but we recognize it as ours when we see it and feel it.
For Vasconcelos, this sensibility is not just for enjoyment. It is something Latin people can teach to others around the globe.
The English-speaking world, mired in materialism and rigid logic, could particularly benefit from absorbing this sensibility: a different kind of aesthetic judgment that yields a more complete form of humanity. Vasconcelos thought it could lead us past the overly rational and bellicose periods of human history.
Bad Bunny’s show began with images of what may have been his barrio in Puerto Rico — or what, based on nostalgia, he may think it was. This idea echoes the work of another famous Caribbean immigrant, Cuba’s Jose Martí.
Martí was also an immigrant — and exile. In New York, he wrote his seminal essay Nuestra América (Our America) in 1891. For him, the word America is all of the Western Hemisphere, especially the Spanish-speaking areas. It is not synonymous with the United States, which is more of a description than a proper name.
In Bad Bunny’s show, the choice to define America as the variegated flags of the American continent’s nations is almost a direct reference to Martí.
Vasconcelos and Martí were not only national figures in their own countries. As immigrants in the U.S. — the former in Texas, the latter in New York — they became part of a transnational notion of identity.
A panethnic Latinidad
As such, they shaped U.S. identity through Chicano culture and Cuban-American sensibilities. They are as American as Emerson or Thoreau.
Many may deride Bad Bunny’s style of singing, but this is beside the point. He wants to meld language into musical rhythm, just as reggaeton is a mix of Jamaican beats and Latin pounding. Reason takes a back seat to pure aesthetic sensation, emotion, and form. All he wants to do is dance. And make romance.
In all the countries he mentioned, from Argentina and Bolivia to the U.S. and his native Puerto Rico, the ludic culture that he presented in the halftime show is in stark contrast to the martial gridiron. His all-white uniform is replicated in the show’s wedding scene, where love takes center stage.
Vasconcelos and Martí would easily recognize this sensibility as their own.
Rudyard Kipling has gone far out of fashion. Born in Bombay, in British India, in 1865, he was an unapologetic imperialist; he even coined the phrase “take up the white man’s burden” to mark the symbolic passage of global power from Britain to the US. Yet his 1919 poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” should be compulsory reading today because it goes to the heart of our contemporary troubles — and suggests a way out.
Kipling wrote “The Gods” in 1919, after a war that had killed as many as 22 million people (including his only son, John) and amid a pandemic that eventually claimed at least another 50 million. The poem contrasts the “gods of the marketplace” — faddish ideas that periodically grip the public — with the “gods of the copybook headings” — pieces of popular wisdom that were printed on the top line of every page in school exercise books. Children were expected to copy them out, learning basic moral lessons while they improved their handwriting.
The end of the Great War released a flock of optimistic ideas about ending war forever, abolishing private property and downgrading nation-states. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar in 1917, and Western policymakers birthed the League of Nations in 1920. Kipling thought that such naive optimism would lead not just to disappointment but to the destruction of civilization. The poem concludes by contrasting humanity’s weakness for self-deception with the stern truths of the copybook headings:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things that are certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit, and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
After the Kipling quotation Wooldridge begins his diatribe, that then gathers steam.
The end of the Cold War gave flight to another flock of optimistic ideas on the world. Many of them, like the ones that infuriated Kipling, came from the left. University departments devoted themselves to presenting Western capitalism as a racist project. (Kipling himself has been “cancelled” in many literature departments.) Progressive NGOs made the case for universal basic income or giving drug addicts free drugs. But a significant difference between our time and Kipling’s is that many of the most naïve ideas have come from the right. Neoliberals argued for linking CEO pay to their company’s stock price, or for abolishing borders or reducing inheritance tax, all in the name of market efficiency. The tech titans waxed lyrical about abolishing death, colonizing Mars and discovering “superintelligence.”
The “gods of the marketplace” all have clever arguments on their side. Derrick Bell, one of the founders of identitarian thinking, rightly pointed out that different forms of disadvantage compound each other. Michael Jensen, one of the founders of “agency theory,” produced elegant arguments about how CEOs (“agents”) will work harder for their “principals” (shareholders) if they have a share in the upside of success (share options). Tech titans such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are, in purely IQ terms, some of the planet’s cleverest people. Yet all this cleverness is as nothing compared with the common wisdom of the copybook headings.
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Editor: To add emphasis to my quotation: Wooldridge first provides chock-a-block a series of diagnoses, followed by his role call of present miscreants! And this : Consider three generic maxims and the price that we have paid for ignoring them:
First: Pride comes before a fall.
Second: A tree without roots cannot thrive.
Third: No civilization can survive without virtue.
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Plato argued that too much popular self-indulgence leads inexorably to demand for a dictator who can restore order. The Founding Fathers believed that “parchment” barriers to tyranny would fail if the people lacked character. Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell warned that the greatest danger to capitalism comes not from without but from within, from a failure to control the appetites that it generates.
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The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York suggests that Trump’s extremism is empowering the left of the Democratic Party. But there are nevertheless reasons for hope.
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The Epstein scandal is so toxic that it is likely to discredit not just the people who moved in his circles but a wider culture of entitlement. A growing number of universities, particularly in the American South, are establishing courses on Western civilization and civic virtue. And a growing number of young people, exhausted by digital distraction, are looking for meaning in great books or traditional culture. There is even a revival of old-fashioned religion in secular Britain. Kipling warned that, if we neglected the gods of the copybook headings, they would return with terror and slaughter.We still have time to appease them with moderation and wisdom.
Editor: The University of Austin (UATX) was founded in 2021 by Joe Lonsdale, Pano Kanelos (President), Niall Ferguson, and Bari Weiss!
As the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is hatred of Jews.
I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.
Start with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God” and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.
It’d be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.
I hope many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism
But this is the brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel. Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.
You can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit targets were Jews.
What of those who attack not Jews, but only Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.
But Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then use those terms: they carry much less baggage.
To state the obvious, criticism of Israel and Zionism is not necessarily anti-Jewish: that’s why there are so many Jewish critics of Israel, inside and outside the country. But it doesn’t take a professor of logic to know that just because x is not always y, it does not follow that x can never be y. Of course opposition to Israel is not always antisemitic. But that does not mean that it is never and can never be antisemitic. As Downing and Kirby have helpfully illustrated.
I hope that, as a result, many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism. I hope they’ll remember that, while most anti-Israel activists are acting in good faith, some are motivated more darkly, while others carelessly express their opposition to Israel in language or imagery that has a melancholy history.
There’s a deeper reason to pause. Many good people on the left want to make things neat and simple by saying that Israel and Zionism have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. That they can deplore the former even while they protect and show solidarity with the latter. But it’s not quite as easy as that.
While many Jews – especially in conversations with each other – condemn Israeli government policy going back many years, they do identify strongly with Israel and its people. A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity. Through ties of family or history, they are bound up with it. When Jews pray they face east – towards Jerusalem. And they have done that for 2,000 years.
It’s inconvenient, I know, but that needs to be remembered by those who insist that there’s no connection between Israel and Jews, that it’s perfectly possible to loathe everything about Israel – the world’s only Jewish country – without showing any hostility to Jews.
Jews themselves usually don’t see it, or experience it, that way. That doesn’t mean no one should ever criticise Israel, for fear of treading on Jewish sensitivities. Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that many Jews worry when they see a part of the left whose hatred of Israel is so intense, unmatched by the animus directed at any other state.
They wonder why the same degree of passion – the same willingness to take to the streets, to tweet night and day – is not stirred by, say, Russia, whose bombing of Syria killed at least 1,700 civilians; or the Assad regime itself, which has taken hundreds of thousands of Arab lives. They ask themselves, what exactly is it about the world’s only Jewish country that convinces its loudest opponents it represents a malignancy greater than any other on the planet?
Which brings us to Jeremy Corbyn. No one accuses him of being an antisemite. But many Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)
Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny.
The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.
Political Observer : Mr. Eaton focuses on this melodrama, while Starmer and his cadre hope to quell the near revolt, or something akin to that? Have I miss-read it?
Keir Starmer has entered the anger stage of his premiership. As much was made clear by his response to Ed Davey at yesterday’s PMQs. After the Lib Dem leader, with a reasonable but wounding tone, accused Starmer of a “catastrophic lack of judgment” over the appointments of Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle, the Prime Minister snapped back that Davey “should take accountability and responsibility” for austerity. That might have worked as a riposte to a question over public spending but it fell short given Davey’s subject was links to paedophiles.
The latest story concerns the case of Sean Morton, an ex-Labour councillor twice convicted of possessing indecent images of children. Doyle, Starmer’s longest-serving director of communications, campaigned for Morton – who stood as an independent candidate in May 2017 – even after he had been charged (Doyle says he accepted Morton’s claims of innocence and has apologised). The Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund reported as much on 27 December 2025 but it was not until Tuesday of this week, as the Mandelson scandal swirled, that Doyle had the Labour whip withdrawn. For now, as the party investigates, he retains his peerage (Lucy Powell, Lisa Nandy and party chair Anna Turley have called for its removal).
It is Starmer’s judgment that is once again the central question. The Prime Minister did not know that Doyle had campaigned for Morton but he did know that he had been “supportive” of him. Five days before Doyle’s peerage was announced, Scottish Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy resigned as the party’s education spokesperson over her close friendship with Morton, making the Prime Minister’s decision to proceed even stranger.
But had Starmer kept his word he would never have been in this invidious position. Back in 2022, he told Labour peers that he would strip politicians of the power to make appointments to the Lords, vowing to “restore trust” after Boris Johnson stuffed the house with “lackeys and donors”. Starmer was right: peerages, doled out as a reward for factional allies or a bauble to potential foes, are an inevitable source of scandal.
Yet in office the temptations of patronage have proved irresistible to Starmer. And so Britain’s unelected second chamber – the largest in the world after China’s National People’s Congress – continues to swell (with only hereditary peers set to be removed).
There is a complacent view in Westminster that subjects such as Lords reform are the preserve of constitutional obsessives, a distraction from the “bread and butter” of politics (in 2009, David Cameron privately described Lords reform as a “third-term issue”). But the elevation of those with links to Epstein and Morton has seen Labour, in the words of Emma Lewell MP, branded the “paedo protectors party”. Starmer is certainly right to be angry – but principally with himself.
Editor: The question that is avoided at all costs, with Eaton and the whole of the British Polititcal Class, is the reality of Jeremy Corbyn’s forced expultion from respectable British Politics. That made way for Tony Blair’s political catamite Keir Starmer!
An unsustainable situation can be sustained for quite a long time. John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May all governed the UK for years after the apparent collapse of their authority. On balance, it is better that Sir Keir Starmer does the same.
“On balance”, because there is no good outcome here. Starmer can only survive by pleasing the many Labour MPs to his left. If he falls, the likeliest successor will come from that same quarter. Either way, Britain is about to get a government it did not and would not vote for. When the likes of Ed Miliband tell Starmer to implement “change”, that is Labour-speak for “policies we couldn’t persuade the country to support in 2015”. Or indeed 2017 or 2019.
So why, if there is to be a mandate-less turn to the left anyway, should Starmer stay?
First, he has at least shown some aptitude for foreign affairs (outside of the occasional ambassadorial appointment). Don’t assume that his successor as prime minister would be able to continue his ongoing diplomatic project: a rapprochement of sorts with Europe and China without alienating the US. The world is not tranquil enough right now to risk finding out.
The other reason to keep Starmer is that a new prime minister would come under immediate pressure to call a general election. If one takes place, a country that has not known much calm for a decade would be disrupted again. Even if it doesn’t, that prime minister would be paralysed by a lack of mandate.
Now a word about the principal alternative to Starmer. From time to time, a political party convinces itself that it has a real “character” on its books. Any evidence that voters are less charmed is tuned out. A Conservative example is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the cartoon blue blood who so amused the wider electorate that he lost his seat. Angela Rayner is Labour’s character. The personal ratings of the former deputy prime minister, who resigned over a property tax, are comparably bad to those of Jeremy Corbyn. Still the notion persists that voters would love her straight-talking woman-of-the-people shtick.
Other alternatives to Starmer include an electoral reject from over a decade ago (Miliband) and the changeling Andy Burnham. In all three cases, the scariest thing is their analysis of the government’s plight.
You have to have access to a special plane of consciousness to believe that Labour is unpopular because it is not leftwing enough. This is a government that removed a child benefit cap that a majority of voters wanted to remain in place (including most Labour voters). It increased taxes on “working people”, having said that economic growth would obviate the need for such measures. It increased regulation on employers and — those other class enemies — landlords. A large plurality of Brits now believe that taxation and spending are too high.
Labour is disliked in large part because it has governed to the left of the prospectus on which it was elected. Anyone who believes the direct opposite is too eccentric of mind to hold the highest office.
And so it must be Starmer. Better a semi-reluctant leftward turn than an enthusiastic one. None of this is to exonerate him. The Tories took six years in office to begin disintegrating. His government has done it in about 18 months, and even that is an overgenerous estimate. In truth, it never recovered from that first Budget.
Besides the incompetence, there is the question of Starmer’s fibre. Before he let a chief of staff called Morgan McSweeney twist in the wind, he let a chief of staff called Sue Gray twist in the wind. He gave up on welfare reform because of protests that would register 4.5 at most on a Richter scale of political dissent. (The government died with that capitulation, I think.) It should be a big thing to suggest that a prime minister is a moral coward. Notice how little fuss there is when the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch does just that. People know.
Still, if Britain should have learned anything from the past decade, it is to scrutinise the idea of “change” more seriously. The faults of EU membership never amounted to a case for leaving. The odiousness of the post-2016 Conservatives was never a good reason to give Labour a landslide. Here is a third opportunity to learn the lesson. The failure of Starmer is not an argument for a new leader.
Part of me thinks a Rayner or Burnham putsch is historically necessary: that only when an avowedly leftwing government is tried and tested to destruction will Britain accept that it must reform its unaffordable state. But that is a columnist’s fancy. Countries must prioritise the practicalities, such as having the least bad available prime minister at any given time.
When asked to re-elect a Labour government to a full second term, the British have always said no, except under Tony Blair. As rash as it is to predict an election that could be three and a half years away, Labour should start to contemplate a scale of defeat on an unrecoverable scale. It is already inviting trouble by straying some way from its 2024 mandate. It is now shaping up to do even more of what no one voted for, egged on by “soft left” MPs who would be out of their depth in a champagne coupe. In suggesting that Starmer should remain in charge of all this, it is hard to know if one is doing him a favour or volunteering him for hell.
Editor: The actual problem that Ganesh’s shadow boxing of a kind seeks to obfuscate, via his political roulette, is that Jeremy Corbyn was subject to a Public Linching, led by respectable political hacks like himself!
0:00 – Introduction and reminder to like and subscribe 0:31 – Overview of the British political crisis involving Peter Mandelson and Keir Starmer 3:15 – Starmer’s admission of knowledge about Mandelson’s Epstein connections 6:50 – Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney scapegoated and resignation 11:32 – Analysis of McSweeney’s resignation letter and implications for Starmer 18:01 – Responsibility for Mandelson’s appointment likely lies with Starmer 25:47 – Additional resignations and growing crisis in Starmer’s government 28:21 – Impact of upcoming Manchester by-election on leadership change timing 30:39 – Prospects for policy change under potential new Labour leadership 33:19 – Insider information on Rishi Sunak’s views on Ukraine policy 36:00 – Critique of Starmer’s character and political actions
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is poised to bring down its first major political leader. That’s not surprising. But it’s amazing that the head to roll looks likely to be that of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Unlike US President Donald Trump, there is no evidence that he ever even met the convicted pedophile. Personal probity is the very least of his problems.
And yet he is in terrible political trouble. His House of Commons majority is unassailable and his mandate runs until the summer of 2029, but bettors predict he will be out of office by the end of June:
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Editor: This collection of ‘data’ titled ‘A Prime Minister in Trouble’ is political window dressing, a holdover from John Authers time as ‘A former chief markets commentator at The Financial Times’ .
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The catalyst was his 2024 decision to make the Labour Party grandee Peter Mandelson ambassador to the US, in the hope that he could smooth the relationship with Trump. Mandelson was fired after his gushing correspondence to Epstein came to light, and the scandal rose to a far more dangerous level last week when the latest downloads revealed emails he had sent to the disgraced financier when he was deputy prime minister, alerting him to market-sensitive policy decisions. This is extremely bad for Mandelson; but there’s no suggestion Starmer knew this when he hired him.
The appointment attracted much commentary at the time, but little condemnation. However, in the last two days, Starmer’s chief-of-staff and head of communications have been forced to resign over the issue, with his chief civil servant now likely to follow. Monday brought a call from Anas Sarwar, the Labour Party’s leader in Scotland, for the prime minister to stand down.
How can a long-dead American pedophile possibly bring down a British prime minister he never met? Tina Fordham of Fordham Global Foresight offers two explanations:
I can’t decide is this just the latest example of the particular disease we have here in the UK, where our politicians are seemingly simultaneously comparatively cheap to bribe…and our political culture is deeply self-righteous…or if the UK government is merely the first casualty in what will become a wider Epstein-induced decapitation strike on the Western political and business establishment.
Editor: John Authers then trades in ‘Market Metaphysyics’? Though it resembles Miss Havisham’s wedding cake!
Markets must now tolerate protracted uncertainty. Labour Party elections take about two months, and there’s no clear front-runner. The most plausible candidates are ideologically to the left of Starmer, and more likely to stoke fiscal problems. Gilt yields jolted up noticeably after Sarwar called for him to go.
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Editor: With only 304 more words and graphs, that awaits the reader attention, and waining patience!
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