I'm just loving Jeremy Corbyn's new beardless look! (hat-tip: Old Holborn)

Trump - the "sound" of manliness and virility, with none of the substance

There are at least a dozen American political commentators I enjoy reading or listening to, but right now my two favourites are Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan. The first is a boyish-looking, 32-year old Harvard Law School graduate from Los Angeles, who has a razor-sharp mind, a machine gun-style delivery, and a "take no prisoners" approach to leftists. The other is Andrew Klavan, a 61-year old popular novelist and scriptwriter (he wrote True Lies, which was turned into a thoroughly enjoyable film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis), a New Yorker who graduated from the home of student radicalism, Berkley. Shapiro has always been a conservative, while Klavan has made the journey from liberalism to conservatism.

Reading Christopher Lasch's "The Revolt of the Elites" just went to the top of my "to do" list

I don't know why I didn't read it when it first came out in 1996, as I'd enjoyed Lasch's earlier The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations enough to read it twice. But, for a variety of reasons, 1996 and 1997 (when I presume the paperback came out) were particularly busy years for me, and I probably wasn't up to reading anything quite as intellectually challenging back then. Today, though, I came across some quotes from The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy in an excellent 2013 article by Ed West (most of Ed West's articles are excellent) that now seem jaw-droppingly prescient. At certain times, certain thinkers just seem to be directly dialled into the Zeitgeist: Lasch certainly was twenty years ago. Here's some evidence: