On the menu today: not just a tribute to one of my favorite writers, the departed P. J. O’Rourke, but an observation of why he stood out so uniquely in the media landscape for so long and why the media environment evolved to prevent other idiosyncratic voices from emulating him. Meanwhile, there’s a pro-parent uprising in San Francisco, and a glaring contradiction between U.S. energy policy and U.S. foreign policy.
R.I.P., P. J. O’Rourke
By the standards of the American political culture of 2022, P. J. O’Rourke seems like an impossible figure: a libertarian-conservative writer known first and foremost for being hilarious, who wrote for the biggest and most mainstream publications — Vanity Fair, Playboy, House and Garden, Inquiry, Car and Driver, Men’s Journal, The Atlantic. The New Republic ran excerpts of his speeches. He became the “Foreign Affairs Desk Chief” at Rolling Stone — he wrote that he had that title because “Middle-Aged Drunk” didn’t look good on a business card. He was briefly a commentator on CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and he appeared on The Tonight Show. When the U.S. sent troops to ...
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Episode 408: Durham’s Bombshell
