By Alessandra Stanley

Few things seem as forced as all those end-of-the-decade retrospectives that list the most important people (Pope Francis, Tina Fey), worst disasters (the climate crisis, the Sopranos finale), or best podcasts READ ON

By Graydon Carter

Paul Newman was a man of many parts: Oscar-winning actor, race-car driver, political activist, environmentalist, and philanthropist. But he used to say that one of his proudest achievements was discovering his name on Nixon’s “enemies list.” READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

We have pension envy. READ ON

By Graydon Carter

Perhaps you’re suffering from Scandal Fatigue. Or some version of PTSD (President Trump Stress Disorder). If you feel you are, you certainly wouldn’t be alone. READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

As the holidays approach, we aren’t reflecting on the year ending so much as dreading what looms ahead. In the era of #MeToo, it’s pretty clear that Time’s Up and #ForeverTrump also mean #Fun’sOver. READ ON

Prince Andrew and Boris Johnson get ratings that rival those of The Crown (not in a good way)

By Stuart Heritage

Prince Andrew has finally learned how to sweat.

For a while there he couldn’t; the result, he claims, of a medical condition stemming from an “overdose of adrenaline” he suffered while being shot at during the Falklands War. The good news is that his condition has now been cured. The bad news is that it took the most jaw-dropping television interview since Frost-Nixon to get him there.

This we know because last Saturday evening the United Kingdom screeched to a halt as one to watch Prince Andrew’s apparently unprompted interview with Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis. Over the course of a single extraordinary hour, with a sense of creeping dread, we witnessed the Queen’s favorite son slowly and systematically set a torch to his entire life. READ ON

By Graydon Carter

Ambassador Gordon Sondland. It has a nice ring to it. READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. What about Ljubljana? READ ON

By Graydon Carter

On a pissy night in Munich earlier this week, I was checking in with my oldest daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, about the fires that have been raging through the hills down from Mulholland Drive, READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

“I and others sat in astonishment.” READ ON

By Graydon Carter

As your grandmother might have said, “A fool empties his head every time he opens his mouth.” Or, in the age of Twitter, the fool engages his tiny, upcurled thumbs and taps away. Our hobby president has been on a roll READ ON

By George Kalogerakis

Well, you can scratch “mandate of Heaven” from the Chosen One’s résumé. Thanks to his latest deft diplomatic maneuvering, President Trump has forfeited that accreditation READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

As we contemplate the latest Oval Office oil spill of venality, vulgarity, and brazen corruption, it’s hard not to pause, sigh, and wonder: What would a smarter, better educated, and less paranoid Donald Trump look like? READ ON

By Graydon Carter

The president of the United States wasn’t crazy back when I first met him, in the early 80s. Craven, tacky, self-regarding—yes, he had all of those enduring attributes. READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau dressing in a turban and brownface for a 2001 “Arabian Nights” party is cultural appropriation. (Yes, he apologized.) Then there is pop-cultural appropriation. We don’t mean when rock stars like Neil Young or Rihanna try to stop Donald Trump from playing their music at his rallies. Suddenly, all kinds of celebrities are calling out people they don’t like for identifying themselves with characters in movies or television shows they do like.

Mark Ruffalo, who played the Hulk in the Avengers movies, lashed out last week at British prime minister Boris Johnson for likening the READ ON

By Graydon Carter

Delusion runs wide and deep within the shallow swamp of Trump hangers-on, fiends, and misfits. That said, the recent pronouncement by Brad Parscale, the president’s 2020 campaign manager, is worrisome even given the Trump clan’s reputation of being world-class fabulists and liars. At a Republican convention in Indian Wells, California, he declared that “the Trumps will be a dynasty that lasts for decades.”

It was the sort of comment that, regardless of the messenger, sends shudders down the spines of most sentient world citizens. It was also the sort of comment that Parscale’s boss—humanity’s foremost flattery magnet—would love, and READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

Choices can be so limiting. For the fortunate, at least, there are times when there is too much of everything to make a decision. Overabundance breeds paralysis—in the shampoo aisle at CVS, in the antiquities department of the Louvre, on the menu at Shopsin’s, or with the movie and television titles on Netflix and Amazon.

And that’s why Air Mail has a rigorously concise selection of “bests.” Every week, we select one—just one—podcast, television show, restaurant, bike, and cool item that readers will want to know about.

This week, we chose Our Boys for the “Watch” category. It’s an Israeli thriller on HBO based on real murders committed in 2014, and it is so nuanced, sophisticated, and smart that Benjamin Netanyahu asked Israelis to boycott it. READ ON

By Graydon Carter

In 1988, I was in my office at Spy magazine, in the Puck Building, on the northern edge of SoHo. I was about to turn 39, and—like today—I worked in a sea of younger editors, assistants, and interns who were all about half my age. To them, I was a dusty antiquity. I wasn’t as slim as I had been at 30—I wasn’t as slim as I had been at 38. There were flecks of gray here and there in my hair. And I was tired. Starting a new magazine—or a new anything, for that matter—is exhausting, and the hours and the exhilaration were beginning to take their toll. I felt like Nick Nolte in that arrest photo. READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

Blame the French. We don’t mean for Jerry Lewis, who actually was a comic genius, but for things like Pétain, structuralism, service compris menus, and now, Woody Allen. His new film, A Rainy Day in New York, is being shown in screenings in Paris and will open there in September, and so now we have to talk about Woody Allen. Again.

And nobody really wants to. His reputation for sexual misconduct—and worse—is too repellent. It’s unthinkable to defend a movie director who married his lover’s daughter, was accused of molesting his own daughter, and as early as 1979 signaled an unhealthy obsession with under-age girls in the once-revered and now troubling movie READ ON

By Graydon Carter

If you haven’t tried our Arts Intel Report (AIR), you really should. My family and I were in France for a good part of 2018, and in our travels it was incredibly time-consuming to find out what was happening in the cities we planned to visit. It was with this in mind that AIR was built—and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first such cultural search engine. You can search by the art or artistic activity you’re interested in and the date and place. We cover more than 490 institutions in 150 cities, and we’re READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

Everybody does it.

That’s what we tell ourselves when we bend the rules. Everybody fibs about their weight, daily alcohol consumption, and favorite novel. (It’s never really Moby-Dick.) Everybody shades the truth on Tinder profiles and tax returns. In certain Zip Codes, we can almost understand how some parents persuade themselves that it’s O.K. to bribe a college-admissions officer: everybody else in Calabasas is greasing their child’s way into U.S.C. on a made-up varsity letter in lacrosse; they’d be saps to hold back. And let’s face it, anybody worth more than $50 million eventually claims a Florida residence—and not for the weather. READ ON

By Graydon Carter

It could be argued that the bucket list, in all its wondrous shapes and forms, may well be one of the more harmful aspects of middle-aged, middle-class humanity. READ ON

By Alessandra Stanley

You forgot, didn’t you?

Everybody does. Recently, we were in the middle of a conversation about the Middle East and forgot the word for Egypt. READ ON

By Graydon Carter

Welcome to this first edition of AIR MAIL. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles we plan for it in the months ahead. But as a general roadmap of where we plan on going, it will have to do. READ ON