StephenKMackSD's Blog

StephenKMackSD.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 18, 2026

https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa

Newspaper Reader offers ‘A Janan Ganesh Cornucopia’!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 18, 2026

Headline: Maga will regret embracing Europe’s hard right

Sub-headline: Nationalists on the continent have historically opposed America more than anything else

https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa

Some selective quotation from Ganesh’s essay, for want of a better descriptor!

…

This wariness of the US only intensifies as we cross from Gaullism, which was and is well within the political mainstream, to the harder right. Today’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) has a pro-Russia bent in what has been a deeply Atlanticist country since the war. Viktor Orbán of Hungary, also “eastern” in his orientation, might be China’s best friend in Europe. Still the anti-China world of Maga extols him like no one bar Trump himself. It is the single oddest thing about an odd movement.

…

For the second consecutive year, a Trump delegate to the Munich Security Conference has given succour to Europe’s far right. Marco Rubio did it with more tact (and to the extent that we can ever know these things, reluctance) than JD Vance did last year. Even so, his allusions to “civilisation” and “Christian faith” amount to coded praise for Orban, who was Rubio’s first stop after Munich. It is natural that European liberals detest these interventions. It is bizarre that American nationalists don’t. Which is likelier to obey Washington’s will over a given period: a garden-variety German federal government or an AfD-inflected one?

Even if these parties did not nurse an existing mistrust of the US, they would have to feign one to win and retain power. None of them wants to gain the reputation of subservience to Trump that was so fatal to the Canadian and Australian right in 2025. How telling that Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally in France, has deplored America’s “imperial” menaces towards Greenland.

In the end, though, this electoral incentive won’t be needed. There is enough underlying prejudice against the US in these political movements. It traces back to the anglophobia of previous centuries: the continental conservative view that Britain was too commercial and scientific a nation to represent real Kultur.

It is hard to know how the US has got itself into such a self-defeating caress with people who dislike it. One possible answer is pig ignorance. Maga, like its leader, is not stupid but seldom lingers over details. It might just not know the rich pedigree of anti-Americanism among continental rightwingers: their perception of the US as not so much a nation as a well-integrated market with a flag on it. European politics can be confounding to an American eye as the hard right overlaps with the hard left in a way that is much less true of the US. Both extremes tend to mistrust the free market, for example. If Vance wants Europe to be a “vibrant economy again”, he is daft to put hope in parties as hostile to competitive reforms as the National Rally and Nigel Farage’s ill-named Reform UK have been.

The other possibility, of course, is that Maga just doesn’t care. Easing hard right parties into office in ancient European capitals would cause pandemonium, and that is an end in itself. Pointing out the awkward implications for American grand strategy is for dorks.

A decade on from its electoral breakthrough, my abiding impression of populism is that commentators take it more seriously than populists themselves do. Calling them “fascist” does not just cheapen what happened in the 1930s and 1940s but grants an unearned seriousness to people who regard politics as just a smashing indoor sport. If they are moved by an -ism, it is nihilism. The love of Orban, whose mistrust of America has not escaped the CIA’s vigilant eye, could not exist in the mind of a sincere America Firster.

In the end, even De Gaulle only bucked the US so much. He was a realist who knew how to set limits on even his most vainglorious schemes. The jingoes of today’s Europe might not show the same restraint. America’s willingness to find out is bizarre. As ever, the best criticism of the Trump government is that it is not even good at selfishness.

---

Editor: A Janan Ganesh cornucopia!

---

Janan Ganesh in The Financial Times: ‘The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below’

Posted on October 16, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Oct 04, 2025 Opinion Life & Arts The war against the quite good The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below Janan Ganesh https://www.ft.com/content/0fc44c6b-277c-4472-a235-65f59a9195f3 Editor: Janan almost pulls out all the stops, for his … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh as Madame Arcati? Political Cynic comments.

Posted on September 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Posted on February 3, 2021 by stephenkmacksd stephenkmacksd.com/ Aug 29, 2025 Title this ‘The Enlightenment of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ ? Mr. Ganesh doesn’t need to dust off his Madame Arcati shtick, he uses C-Span to demonstrate that Bill Clinton’s utter … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh of the ever changing registers of ‘thought’?,’political convenience’ & always wraped in self-congratulation!

Posted on February 10, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader. stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 10, 2025 Editor : For those of us who have not read this Stendahl novel, here is Penguin Random House to the rescue: The Red and the Black Reader’s Guide By Stendhal https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298093/the-red-and-the-black-by-stendhal/9780140447644/readers-guide In Stendhal’s The … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh abandons Tom Wolfe for Shahrazad?

Posted on January 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Jan 02, 2025 Headline: Things have to get worse to get better Sub-headline : Voters can’t be sold on change until their nation is in acute trouble https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8d92a-0c1d-424e-83be-c3469c370c19 Editor:The Reader of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh never diappointes?

Posted on December 22, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader follows the convoluted politics of a Financial Times Mandarin! stephenkmacksd.com/ Dec 22, 2024 Opinion: Populism Headline: Economics can’t explain all the anger of voters Sub-headline: If it did, the US should have much healthier politics than Europe Janan … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh in the Life and Arts section of The Financial Times, where he belongs!

Posted on November 4, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Ganesh proclaims: ‘We will be living in Trumpland for decades’ stephenkmacksd.com/ Nov 03, 2024 Editor: Mr. Ganesh begins his essay with this ‘The paragraph that follows is the most reluctantly written of my career.’: what might The Reader make of … Continue reading →

…

The World is full of Surprises, but not in Janan Ganesh World: it’s a Crowd Scene pretending to be an essay! via a 1966 Black & White Photograph.

Posted on August 18, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Cynic thinks of the long dead American Poet Frank O’Hara! The opening paragraphs are not exactly replaced, but a black & white photo of three long dead American literary figures : John Updike, John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller at an …

…

Political Observer can’t resist Janan Ganesh political embroidery, or all that Royal Icing on Miss Haversham’s wedding cake ?

Posted on August 16, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer shares his thoughts! What does Miss Haversham’s wedding cake have to do with Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay? Telling question? Miss Haversham was left at the alter, and her life ended is a moment of betrayal, that metastasized into … Continue reading →

…

Political Observer confesses: I can’t resist Janan Ganesh chatter, @FT !

Posted on August 15, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Just look at the political actors, players, walk-ons in Ganesh’ s latest Historical Re -Write its like crewel embroidery aided by gusts of Hot Air . Editor: Paragraph 1: …the American left…, …Defund the Police…,…White Fragility…, Politics being downstream of culture,…, Dave … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on ‘the demand for a bolder Starmer’ is about a: ‘journalistic euphemism for “left wing” ‘

Posted on June 7, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer wonders where that ‘left wing’ might be? Not at The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The New Statesman.* The regular reader has to wince at Janan Ganesh’s latest political commentary, that now places him … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on: ‘The shock of the old’, ‘low birth rates’, ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’& a Mitt Romney 47% pastiche!

Posted on June 7, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer opens a door? Mr. Ganesh’s ‘politicking’ reaches into the the most unlikely places, and chooses unlikely persons to make his arguments! Wedded to self-congratulation about his imagined victory about ‘low birth rates’ and the underserving retirees: ‘old people will have to remain productive … Continue reading →

…

It’s almost a pleasure to read Janan Ganesh @FT?

Posted on May 23, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer comments. After this May 17, 2024 opening paragraph: When I was two or three, I went walkabout and wasn’t found until some time later at a local mall. What a close brush with disaster, readers will think. What … Continue reading →

…

Is it possible that boulevardier Janan Ganesh offering a ‘Mulligan Stew’, instead of his usual… his readership might miss his proffered rhetorical ‘Caviar and Blinis’ ?

Posted on April 12, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Cynic comments Opinion Populism Headline: The west is suffering from its own success Sub-headline: Smartphone addiction, culture wars and low birth rates are byproducts of wealth https://www.ft.com/content/74918df2-6911-4087-8add-c11df2811129 A sampler of this ‘Mulligan Stew’ that Ganesh prepares for his readers is helpful: … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on ‘The welcome demise of big-government Toryism’…

Posted on January 10, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Commentator wonders, where the Homeless & Hungry might fit into ‘Ganesh World’? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… January 11, 2024: In my haste to comment on Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay, I commented about the Hunger and Homelessness in Britain. I failed in my … Continue reading →

…

Professional boulevardier Janan Ganesh diagnoses ‘The American Problem’, while ignoring the Genocide in Palestine… any surprise?

Posted on December 19, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Political Reporter comments. Opinion US society America’s cultural supremacy and geopolitical weakness The notion of ‘decline’ is too crude to capture what is happening to the US in the 21st century. https://www.ft.com/content/dce07860-f39e-432b-a0f6-1a2124e4e1a3 The Reader has to wonder at the opening of … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh plunges his Silver-Fork into the Crisis of The West.

Posted on October 24, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Philosophical Apprentice comments. Note that Janan Ganesh is part of the Silver Fork Tradition of writers, even though that might seem an odd qualification, for a Financial Times ‘expert/technocrat’ on ‘Geopolitics’ ? Headline: Don’t flatter the west’s enemies as an ‘axis’ Sub-headline: Democracies should tease out … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh reads an Economist map…

Posted on October 5, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer wonders at this political intervention. Recall the ascent and reign of Janan Ganesh, of another time? Those apt quotations from an obscure L.A. restaurant critic ? Or even a quote from American Silver-Fork gargoyle Tom Wolfe? In his latest essay … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on Mitt Romney and Rory Stewart.

Posted on September 20, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Philosophical Apprentice & Political Cynic collaborate! Headline: Mitt Romney, Rory Stewart and the tragedy of politics Sub-headline: In public life, unlike in business, there is no reward for being right https://www.ft.com/content/511ea709-a921-4ec2-9a36-34fa1b0216e9 Did Janan Ganesh read David Brooks’ essay in praise … Continue reading

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 17, 2026

Editor:

Civilization

by Roger Osborne

A New History of the Western World

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/362231/civilization-by-roger-osborne/9780099526063

---

Marco Rubio gave a speech Saturday to the Munich Security Conference in which he extolled an ideal that’s supposedly long out of fashion.

“We are part of one civilization: Western civilization,” the U.S. secretary of state told his largely European audience. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

The speech got, and deserved, a standing ovation.

…

What, exactly, is Western civilization? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that not one of America’s top colleges and universities had a required survey course in Western civ and only 32 percent even offered it as an elective.

…

What many universities do offer (even more so now than when the N.A.S. issued its report) is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civ: the examination of all the ways in which Western civilization is, purportedly, an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental despoliation, misogyny and white supremacy and phobias of every kind.

This pedagogy in civilizational self-loathing — some of it justified and overdue, much of it distorted by factual fudging and decontextualized historical judgments — has done three kinds of damage.

…

First, it helped spawn a generation of self-certain progressives, notably the pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses during the Gaza war, who only dimly seem to recognize that they are the very people they are being taught to hate. Who, after all, is more of a settler-colonialist — a Protestant, white, English-speaking undergrad in Los Angeles or a Jewish, Mizrahi, Hebrew-speaking one in Jerusalem? And does a typical Hamas militant despise a fervent Christian evangelical any more than he despises an anti-Zionist trans activist?

Second, it fueled a reactionary conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. I have in mind people like Alexander Gauland, a founder of Germany’s fascist-leaning Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” I’m also thinking of JD Vance, our cynical vice president, who last year met with an AfD leader after scolding an audience in Munich for refusing to respect free speech or accept the results of an election.

But the worst damage is to normal citizens in modern democracies who, unless they’ve sought it out for themselves, lack a clear idea of what the West stands for: It’s what Robert Maynard Hutchins called, in 1952, “The Great Conversation.”

…

Editor: Reader first aquainte yourself with Harry S. Ashmore’s biography of Robert Maynard Hutchens.

And the Robert Maynard Hutchins: American educator at Britannica Editors https://www.britannica.com/topic/University-of-Chicago

…

Hutchins was active in forming the Committee to Frame a World Constitution (1943–47), led the Commission on Freedom of the Press (1946), and vigorously defended academic freedom, opposing faculty loyalty oaths in the 1950s. After serving as associate director of the Ford Foundation (from 1951), he became president of the Fund for the Republic (1954) and in 1959 founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Santa Barbara, California) as the fund’s main activity. The Center was an attempt to approach Hutchins’s ideal of “a community of scholars” discussing a wide range of issues—individual freedom, international order, ecological imperatives, the rights of minorities and of women, and the nature of the good life, among others.

From 1943 until his retirement in 1974, Hutchins was chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica and a director for Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. He was editor in chief of the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and coeditor, from 1961 to 1977, with Mortimer J. Adler, of an annual, The Great Ideas Today.

Hutchins’ views on education and public issues appeared in No Friendly Voice (1936), The Higher Learning in America (1936), Education for Freedom (1943), and others. Later books include The University of Utopia (1953), Some Observations on American Education (1956), and The Learning Society (1968).

---

Mr. Stephens attempt the shoehorn Hutchins whose ‘Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions’ was liberal, as Ashmore’s biography makes plan. I read Ashmore’s biography when it was published! Mr. Stephens’ wan attemp to lay claim to the Hutchins legacy is a execise in Straussian mendacity!

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 17, 2026

Newspaper Reader.

Is the utterly wayward, indeed bumptious Starmer, about to be caught in the quick-sand of of the unamed Peter Mandelson? The fact that Mandelson is not ever mentioned in political essay leades the …

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 16, 2026

Editor: Since the assent of Zanny Minton Beddoes, that old boys club that once consisted of Wooldridge & Micklethwait is gone.

Headline: How to oust a prime minister

Sub-headline: History offers useful lessons for those plotting to get rid of Sir Keir Starmer

https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/02/14/how-to-oust-a-prime-minister

Editor: The Oxbridgers that populate this ‘News Magazine’ bring with themselves that patina of an education, that reekes of the old school tie and carefully managed references, to their academic achievments! In the use of quotations, references, and a well execised self-belief ! The two well wrought paragraphs below offer?

It is haunting season in Westminster. As ever when the mood is mutinous, its denizens are on the lookout for a posse of phantom ministers, sometimes known as the men in grey suits. Rumour holds that in the coming months they may glide into Number 10 and tell Sir Keir Starmer that his time is up. If the past is a guide, though, this ghostly group will not materialise.

History offers lessons for Labour MPs still hoping to oust Sir Keir. They apply across parties and time, from the deferential era of yore to today, when British political leaders have the shelf-life of smartphone models. A big takeaway for plotters concerns those men (or women) in grey suits. It is no use waiting for some spectral figure to do the dirty work discreetly. You have to grip the axe, openly and together.

---

Editor: Look to this illustration that frames the above.

Reader compair the above illustartion to this from September 19th 2015

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/09/19/backwards-comrades

Editor : Compair and contrast the styles of these presentations- which is the more effective propagnda tool?

---

Editor: Below the Oxbridgers offer a political strategy:

The first lesson for mutineers is: pick the right moment. The wake of a chastening by-election—like that in Gorton and Denton on February 26th—could be propitious; more so a humbling for the ruling party in local or regional elections, such as those on May 7th. But plotters must have an eye on the wider chronology. Deposing a leader in the middle of a parliament invites pressure to hold a general election, which a party in the doldrums may lose. Wait much longer, and it can seem too late to change the public’s mind.

This “goldilocks problem”, as Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University of London, terms it, applies to the state of the nation too. It makes no sense to ditch a leader if everything is tickety-boo. But assailing one in an emergency may look self-indulgent (unless, like Liz Truss, she obviously caused it). “No time for a novice,” proclaimed Gordon Brown, the embattled Labour prime minister during the financial crisis of 2007-09—a gibe partly directed at pretenders on his own side. Today the jittery bond market discourages upheaval.

Time their ambush wisely, and insurgents enjoy natural advantages. For starters, prime ministers are distracted by the need to keep running the country: facing a leadership challenge in 1990, Margaret Thatcher flew off to a summit that marked the end of the cold war. Next, as both she and (in 2022) Boris Johnson learned, leaders can be too cocooned or aloof to grasp their peril. “They’re hard-headed enough to know that their colleagues would all kill them if they could,” says Sir Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London. “But they tend to think they’re invulnerable, and that’s what gets them in the end.”

…

Editor: From The Econmist of Feb 11th 2026
…

Sir Keir is dead. Long live Sir Keir!

Britain is in the midst of a constitutional experiment. The prime minister does not command a majority; the majority commands him. Labour’s backbenchers—that mix of former trade-union officials, lobbyists and people who attend seminars on The Third Sector best labelled the “soft left”—now run the country. To govern is to choose and Labour mps have to pick who will be the face of this new government.

Herein lies the problem. Labour’s mps have proved incapable of taking any tricky decision voluntarily. They faint at modest reforms to welfare and wince at spending restraint. When it comes to the prime minister, external circumstances will, eventually, force a choice. Perhaps a mortifying by-election defeat to the Green Party in a Manchester suburb later this month will jolt them, or a May massacre in Scotland, Wales and London. Maybe the remorseless prospect of defeat in 2029 will foist action upon them. Until then, they can grumble, brief and watch videos of Mr Carns doing pull-ups while wondering what could be.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/02/11/the-alternatives-to-sir-keir

Editor: If only The Economist could offer a coherent critique of Starmer !

---

UK’s Top Civil Servant Quits in Fresh Upheaval for Starmer

The UK’s top civil servant quit his post after just 14 months, adding to the churn in Keir Starmer’s government that had already seen him lose two of his most senior aides this week.

Chris Wormald is standing down as cabinet secretary with immediate effect, the government said on Thursday in a statement that didn’t elaborate a reason for the resignation. The decision was reached “by mutual agreement” with the prime minister, it said.

Wormald’s departure underscores the instability in Starmer’s administration after his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, on Sunday, and his communications chief, Tim Allan, a day later. The now former cabinet secretary becomes the shortest-serving holder of the post since its inception 110 years ago.

Nevertheless, the move will likely be welcomed by those in the governing Labour Party who perceived Wormald — a veteran of the civil service — to have been a block on change, government officials told Bloomberg earlier this week.

When he appointed Wormald in 2024, Starmer demanded “the fundamental re-wiring of the British state.” The hire provoked some internal opposition because Wormald had worked in Whitehall for three decades and was not seen as someone who was likely to shake up the system.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-12/uk-s-top-civil-servant-quits-in-fresh-upheaval-for-starmer

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 15, 2026

Life & Arts

Liberals should mourn the passing world

Why apologise for what was the most successful international order in history?

Best regards!

StephenKMackSD

(A bold leap is what we need)

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 15, 2026

Headline: A bold leap is what we need. We’d take the pain for the promise of growth.

Sub-headline: Wes Streeting’s criticism still rings true — growth is the most fundamental task of this or any government.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/labour-economy-bold-leap-growth-g6xcjg505

Editor: Colvile’ opening paragraphs can easily be called ‘chatter’!

Say what you will about Keir Starmer. No, there isn’t a “but” to follow. It’s just the order of the day in Westminster. With the prime minister’s authority in shreds, his colleagues are happily venting all of their frustrations with his performance and personality, often with only the thinnest veil of anonymity.

Editor: Are the following paragraph’s something like a replacement for actual political thought, or its burlesque?

But the most salient criticism is one that was never intended to become public. In his text message exchanges with Peter Mandelson, released last week, Wes Streeting laments: “There isn’t a clear answer to the question: why Labour?” Mandelson replies: “The government doesn’t have an economic philosophy which is then followed through in a programme of policies.” Seconds later Streeting concurs: “No growth strategy at all.”

Editor: Let me offer The Reader some telling quotations from the body of Colevile’s political interventions.

…

The UK economy ended last year with growth of 0.1 per cent in the final quarter. On a per capita basis, we are already in recession.

Housing, which was meant to be one of the core priorities of the government, is moribund outside London, and collapsing within it. Energy prices are still hideously high. Unemployment is rising. If boosting growth is the core mission of this government, then it definitely gets a failing grade.

…

Now, I’m going to do something hugely unfashionable, and point out that by no means all of this is Labour’s fault. Growth per head has been falling since the 1980s. Productivity has flatlined since the financial crisis, especially in the public sector. Nor is this a uniquely British problem: throughout Europe stagnant growth and surging populism are going hand in hand.

…

On this front Labour’s original plan was, essentially, to not be the Tories. The theory was that businesses and investors would prize certainty and stability over a few measly tax rises. But it didn’t work out like that, to put it mildly. So what now?

…

The problem is that politics is not about good intentions, but trade-offs and results. Everyone wants growth. But will Labour’s new masters on the soft left really prioritise business over the voracious spending demands of the NHS and welfare system?

…

The first is to retreat to the soft left comfort zone of Rayner and Ed Miliband.

…

Politicians tend to close their minds as long as they can … because they believe that decisive action must inevitably bring political calamity upon their governments.”

…

“Political survival depends on making quality decisions; compromised policies lead to voter dissatisfaction; letting things drift is political suicide.”.

…

There is a deep well of realism and common sense among the ordinary people of the community. They want politicians to have the guts and the vision to deliver sustainable gains in living standards.”

…

They look for policies with instant appeal to create continuous public bliss”).

…

Starmer’s Labour came to power by taking the opposite of Douglas’s advice. It told the public that spending would rise, growth would rise but taxes and borrowing would not.

…

But I believe — I have to believe — that the public will still reward politicians who are honest about our country’s problems and visibly try their damnedest to fix them. Because if not, what hope have we got?

---

Editor: What eludes Colvile’s thought processes is that Starmer, the political creature of Tony Blair, who defamed Jeremy Corbyn, that lead inexorably to the current political collapse? Starmer is the natural successor of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak!

American Observer.

Newspaper Reader .

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 14, 2026

The Atlantic hires David Brooks as a staff writer

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.”

Newspaper Reader.

February 9, 2026

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 14, 2026

The Buenos Aires Herald!

Bad Bunny’s Nuestra América

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.

Diego von Vacano

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.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 14, 2026

Editor: Wooldridge begins with these paragraphs and a quote of form Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” .

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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!

Newspaper Reader.