The Education of Caron Butler

Review: Caron Butler and Steve Springer, ‘Tuff Juice’
Caron Butler

Caron Butler / AP

BY: Ian Lindquist  — 

If you walked onto a certain street corner around midnight when Caron Butler was eleven years old, you would have caught him dealing crack to strung-out addicts, making more money in a night than most adults in his neighborhood make each week.

If you had tracked down Butler half his lifetime later, at twenty-two, you would have found him playing for the NBA’s Miami Heat as a rookie small forward. There, he was still making money, to be sure, but he was living a life that inspired his family, his friends, and strangers who marveled at his athletic prowess. What brought Butler from the streets of Racine, Wisconsin, to the heights of athletic stardom?

Editor's Blog

That Ernest Moniz-John Kerry High Five Was ‘Just About Crepes’

John Kerry double high-fives Ernest Moniz / AP

BY: Brent Scher

A picture of John Kerry and Ernest Moniz high-fiving in Lausanne, Switzerland, was used all over the place and taken by many as a sign that negotiations were going well but really it was “just about the crepes,” according to Moniz, who was asked about the March picture during an Esquire interview.

Dem Senator Unsure If ‘Enemy Is Connected to Islam’

Sherrod Brown

BY: Adam Kredo

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) struggled to explain whether he believes there is a connection between Islam and terrorist forces aiming to launch strikes at the United States when questioned by another leading lawmaker Thursday evening on the Senate floor, according to video of the exchange.

OPM Improperly Used Taxpayer Dollars to Protect Victims of Hack

AP

BY: Morgan Chalfant

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) improperly handled a nearly $21 million contract awarded to a company to protect the identities of millions of victims of a cyber attack on the federal agency.

The Party Divides

Column: A Trump nomination would be the end of the GOP as we know it
Donald Trump
BY: Matthew Continetti  — 

The speed with which prominent Republican officials and conservative spokesmen condemned Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States revealed the true stakes in the 2016 election. The future of the GOP as we know it is in question—not the party’s political future but its ideological one. Donald Trump’s candidacy is already intensifying party divisions. Nominating him would alter the character of the Republican Party in a fundamental way.

Holy Fools

Review: Christopher Buckley, ‘The Relic Master: A Novel’
Christopher Buckley / Wikimedia Commons
BY: Joseph Bottum  — 

There’s a line about satire you sometimes hear—a line how all truly great satire, the hilariously brutal stuff, is written by conservatives. Or, at least, a line about how all the best satirists end up expressing deeply conservative ideas.

It’s not exactly true, of course. The claim was born, I think, not so much from an idea about the universal form of satire but from the particularities of the 20th century’s tangled literary politics. When a kind of high liberalism is overwhelmingly dominant, as it has been in English-language cultures for over a hundred years, what other direction is there but conservatism for comic contrariness?

DHS Official Unable to Give Number of Syrians in U.S. or Number of Expired Visas

Senior official stumped on questions concerning immigration problems
Syria refugee
BY: Adam Kredo  — 

A senior Department of Homeland Security official was unable to tell Congress the number of Syrian refugees who have entered the United States in the last year, nor the number of Americans who have travelled to Syria and returned, according to testimony on Capitol Hill that angered many lawmakers and raises serious concerns.

‘Macbeth’ and ‘Chi-Raq’ Reviews

Shakespeare and Aristophanes, revisited
Michael Fassbender Marion Cotillard Macbeth
BY: Sonny Bunch  — 

Macbeth is a faithful reworking of Shakespeare’s masterwork, textually: condensed a bit, but the broad strokes are all accounted for. You’ve probably never seen The Scottish Play done quite like this, however. Director Justin Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw have crafted a boldly impressionistic adaptation of Macbeth, one that relies on color and film speeds to get the mood across as much as acting or dialogue.

Art After Alexander at the National Gallery

Review: ‘Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World,’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from Dec. 13, 2015 to Mar. 20, 2016
Sleeping Eros, 300- 100 B.C. / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund
BY: Aaron MacLean  — 

The identity of Alexander the Great’s tutor—Aristotle—is well known to anyone with even a limited classical education, but the conqueror’s favorite sculptor and court portraitist is less of a household name. It was Lysippos, a significant figure in 4th-century B.C. sculpture even without his connection to Alexander. Pliny the Elder reports that the prolific artist—he is thought to have produced something like 1,500 bronze sculptures—was famous for a new approach to symmetry, softening the rigidity or “squareness” of the 5th century, and for his attention to details like the realistic portrayal of hair.

The Party Divides

Column: A Trump nomination would be the end of the GOP as we know it
Donald Trump
BY: Matthew Continetti  — 

The speed with which prominent Republican officials and conservative spokesmen condemned Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States revealed the true stakes in the 2016 election. The future of the GOP as we know it is in question—not the party’s political future but its ideological one. Donald Trump’s candidacy is already intensifying party divisions. Nominating him would alter the character of the Republican Party in a fundamental way.

Holy Fools

Review: Christopher Buckley, ‘The Relic Master: A Novel’
Christopher Buckley / Wikimedia Commons
BY: Joseph Bottum  — 

There’s a line about satire you sometimes hear—a line how all truly great satire, the hilariously brutal stuff, is written by conservatives. Or, at least, a line about how all the best satirists end up expressing deeply conservative ideas.

It’s not exactly true, of course. The claim was born, I think, not so much from an idea about the universal form of satire but from the particularities of the 20th century’s tangled literary politics. When a kind of high liberalism is overwhelmingly dominant, as it has been in English-language cultures for over a hundred years, what other direction is there but conservatism for comic contrariness?

That Ernest Moniz-John Kerry High Five Was ‘Just About Crepes’

John Kerry double high-fives Ernest Moniz / AP
BY: Brent Scher  — 

A picture of John Kerry and Ernest Moniz high-fiving in Lausanne, Switzerland, was used all over the place and taken by many as a sign that negotiations were going well but really it was “just about the crepes,” according to Moniz, who was asked about the March picture during an Esquire interview.

DHS Official Unable to Give Number of Syrians in U.S. or Number of Expired Visas

Senior official stumped on questions concerning immigration problems
Syria refugee
BY: Adam Kredo  — 

A senior Department of Homeland Security official was unable to tell Congress the number of Syrian refugees who have entered the United States in the last year, nor the number of Americans who have travelled to Syria and returned, according to testimony on Capitol Hill that angered many lawmakers and raises serious concerns.