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