Compact Magazine

One sunny day in June, I opened up my university email, which I only do occasionally now that I am retired, to see an email marked “confidential” in my inbox. In it, the deputy vice-chancellor at my former employer, the University of Sunderland, informed me of an external complaint concerning my recent public social media activity. When I eventually managed to see the much-redacted complaint, it found fault with the “tone and nature” of my online engagement on the top

The future world statesman, in full military uniform, leaps athletically on to the table. Then he reaches up into the ceiling lamp of his hotel room and pulls out a concealed microphone. It has been placed there by his American allies, or perhaps by the perfidious British. Or possibly by both at once. There are a lot of wires. If there is one brief scene which encapsulates the two vast new films about Charles de Gaulle, I think this is it. They recount the astonishing melodrama of the rebirth of

In the last week of July, two incidents involving disruptive Chinese fans of a genre of Asian media triggered something close to a crisis in international relations.  Security personnel had forcibly removed a Chinese woman from an event in Bangkok. Patrons of this type of event, known as a “fan meet,” pay considerable sums to see their favorite entertainers in person, hear them being interviewed, and watch them perform song-and-dance routines. Tens of thousands of Chinese went

On September 13, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, wrote on X, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” referring to a photograph that showed a few dozen Indian American students celebrating the University of Texas’s football win over Ohio State. This resulted in a massive online debate, pitting Indian Americans and their defenders against the group’s critics. If it was happening in a vacuum, you

The resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warns that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” has prompted a new wave of attention to existential risk from AI, while drawing scrutiny to what the people working at frontier AI companies really believe about the technology they are developing. Many of those who continue to work at Anthropic and OpenAI share Coxon’s fears. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, declared in a post followi

In the wake of Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2024, one heard often that Democrats needed to focus on class rather than identity. But what exactly does it mean to focus on class? And what class is it that Democrats need to focus on? The party’s surging left wing has a clear answer—the working class—and usually offers an expansive conception of who is included in that category. “I think if you have to work to pay your bills,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani

Every developed country faces a deeply uncomfortable problem: People are getting older. This means a fiscal crisis sometime in the coming decades, because it results in more dependents on the welfare state and fewer taxpayers. Equally, it means a cultural crisis, because the habits of mutual dependence and reverence for age are being eaten away by the culture of Now. Simply put, we don’t know what to do with the dependent and unproductive people in our midst.No wonder some people are mull

Young people are unhappy, and many observers think they know what is to blame: technology. The most influential argument in this direction comes from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Haidt argued that giving young people smartphones in the early 2010s “rewired” childhood, which led to large upticks in anxiety, depression, and related ailments. Haidt’s argument has begun to influence policymakers in many locales, informing efforts to l

The German political establishment’s so-called firewall against the far right is crumbling. This month, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) secured 44 percent of the vote in the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, and the party is now polling at 37 percent in the upcoming vote in nearby Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Those alarmed by the AfD’s rise in the former East might take comfort in the fact that the party currently polls at roughly half those levels in the country’s wes

Not long after he arrived in Ireland over the weekend, President Donald Trump declared that it would be “fantastic” and a “cool thing” if the island were to be politically unified, offering an unexpected boost to the Irish republican cause. This came just a few weeks after the administration announced it was “reviewing” its position on the British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, long claimed by Argentina. This statement galvanized the Trump-allied

The new Netflix production Generation 9/11 is one of those documentaries that tries to do too many things at once, but it finds some of its most affecting moments in interviews with the grown children of the dead. One young woman, Laurel Homer, pays moving homage to her father, fallen United 93 copilot LeRoy Homer. As a Zoomer, she feels singularly lonely in her grief. To the rest of her generation, the images of 9/11 are little more than irony-pilled meme fodder. These are not like the memes th

When Army Air Forces officer Claude Eatherly piloted the plane Straight Flush in support of Enola Gay’s mission to obliterate the city of Hiroshima, his tasks were little different from those of past flights. It was just another flight requiring the twenty-six-year-old’s technical acumen, but it also involved wiping 70,000 people off the face of the earth. Eatherly would later feel anguish over his role: He repeatedly attempted suicide and was eventually institutionalized. At the t

Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American RightBy Stephanie SladeNotre Dame, 291 pages, $30For centuries, conservative thinkers have asked themselves: Where did it all go wrong? A few of them have settled on impersonal historical transitions like the agricultural or industrial revolutions, but most answers have tended to involve wrong turns in thought: the Gnostics, William of Ockham, Machiavelli. As Richard Weaver put it in the title of his 1948 book (the locus classicus of the

Conservatism might be defined as the preference for the devil you know over the devil you don’t. The conservative wants to protect the social order, even with all its imperfections, from sudden upheaval. If you approve of a society taking a proverbial leap in the dark, then whatever else you may be, you are not a conservative. In the words of Edmund Burke, what the conservative recoils from above all is “rashly to engage in perilous adventures.”“Whatever else you may

In 1944, when Hannah Arendt sat down to compose the notes for what would become The Origins of Totalitarianism, not two years had passed since news of the Nazi death camps had reached America. American troops were on their way to the beaches of Normandy to sledgehammer into Europe, but the streets of Paris were still under German control. After moving to Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1941, Arendt had begun working for a German-Jewish weekly called Aufbau, for which she wrote many of the

As every American knows, the insanity defense is simple. You’ve committed a terrible crime. You planned it meticulously. You knew it was wrong. You did it anyway, and you got caught. But you’ve got a plan to get away with it. When the bailiff hauls you before the court and the district attorney reads out the charges, you just smile serenely. Your lawyer pats you on the shoulder. He lives to help criminals evade responsibility. They finish reading the charges. The judge asks how you

Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, Iceland chose to stay out of the European Union, becoming instead a founder member of the European Economic Area (EEA), a much looser arrangement that grants access to the single market without membership of the Union. And on August 29, Icelanders voted to keep things that way, rejecting their government’s proposal to reopen accession negotiations with the EU: 52.8 percent against, 47.2 percent in favor, on a turnout of 82.5 pe

One of the more revealing moments in what we now call “Woke 1” was the firestorm around the philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel’s paper “In Defense of Transracialism.” Tuvel began by observing the contrasting progressive reactions to the gender transition of Caitlyn Jenner, which was widely celebrated, and the racial “transition” of Rachel Dolezal, which was just as widely reviled. Given that Tuvel later became an anti-woke cause célèbre,

In recent years, heightened tensions between the United States and China have led to talk of a new Cold War. The standard framing of this conflict, both from the anti-imperialist left and the civilizationist right, reprises themes of the twentieth century, treating it as a struggle between colonizer and colonized or capitalism and communism.The 2020 book Trade Wars Are Class Wars, by the economists Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis, complicates this view. Klein and Pettis, who

Vice President JD Vance made headlines last week by favorably quoting Huey Long, the Depression-era senator and governor of Louisiana. “The great Southern populist,” Vance said, made “‘every man a king’ the goal of his political program.” The Trump Administration shares that goal, Vance implied. “But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals,” the vice president continued. “No man is a king if they can’t tak