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Frank Sinatra was the most influential popular singer of the 20th century – not just because of a six-decade career of big hit records, but because his taste in music and the longevity of his success helped shape and expand the American Songbook. Not all icons survive death: I think of Leonard Bernstein or Bob Fosse, both at their passing the most celebrated practitioners in their respective fields, or Bing Crosby, the biggest selling recording artist of all time at the time he left us, and these days little more than a guy who gets played on the holiday channels...

Today marks the first anniversary of The Mark Steyn Club, founded exactly twelve months ago on May 6th 2017. So we wish a happy birthday to us, and more importantly to all our first-day Founding Members, whom we hope will want to re-subscribe for another fun year to come. We welcome new members too, of course. But on this anniversary there's really only one song we could pick for our Song of the Week. Sometimes in this department, rock fans aren't familiar with the jazz standards, and jazz fans aren't familiar with the hymn tunes, and hymn fans aren't familiar...

Two nights ago with Tucker Carlson, I discussed the decision of the Boy Scouts of America to drop the "Boy" bit. The ruination of a great civilizing institution has been accomplished in a mere two decades. As I wrote three years ago: In the late Nineties, the BSA said no to gay scoutmasters. I was on the floor of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 2000 when they had some Eagle scouts as an honor guard - and in my section of the crowd everyone booed. And I remember thinking, "Man, these Dems are nuts. Booing boy scouts?" But...

There have been exciting developments in the "Russia investigation". There always are, because that is the nature of open-ended money-no-object investigations. But, to me, the most interesting development was the testimony of Michael Caputo, who appeared just before me on Tucker Carlson's show last night. Mr Caputo was, briefly, a very minor Trump campaign aide - and so his life has been destroyed. As he told the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday: "In 2009, my wife and I moved to my hometown of East Aurora, New York to have a family. Making far less money back home, we had a far...

Fifty years ago this coming week - May 2nd 1968 - the world heard for the first time one of the great instrumental movie themes of all time, composed by Neal Hefti to accompany Jack Lemmon as he pads through a seedy Times Square at night and checks into a fleabag hotel to hurl himself to death from his bedroom window. Instead, he finds the window nailed shut, and, in frantically trying to open it so he can throw himself out, instead throws his back out. He winds up at a go-go bar and, uninterested in the dancers, throws back...

As we approach the first anniversary of The Mark Steyn Club, we'll be presenting some musical celebrations as part of the festivities, so do keep an eye on our home page as the days go by. I've always thought of our Song of the Week as perhaps our least controversial department, if only by comparison with all the war and politics and whatnot all over the rest of the site. So I was interested to discover our musical offerings are as toxic as everything else around here. Late on Friday, having brought a ten-million dollar suit against me and lost...

Good Morning/Afternoon, MEGAWELCOMEMarkSteynAsGuestHostDITTOS!

For our non-American readers, I should explain that Mark Levin is one of the most successful radio hosts in the United States. In fact, a few days ago he was nominated for the National Radio Hall of Fame. I also want to re-emphasize what I said last week: I did not pick a fight with CRTV. They picked a fight with me - and two judges have now ruled that they lost, comprehensively. The day after the New York Supreme Court confirmed my victory over CRTV, Mark Levin took to his radio show and gave a leisurely retrospective of the...

Half-a-century ago today, Enoch Powell gave the speech that ended his political ambitions within the British Conservative Party, but ensured that he would be a more consequential figure than any of the hack timeservers who prospered in the Tory cabinets of Edward Heath. It's known to history as "the 'Rivers of Blood' speech", which is a slight misrendering of a characteristically Powellite classical allusion - even then, in the pre-soundbite era, a risky business for a politician seeking to curry favor with the media. To mark the anniversary, BBC Radio, controversially, aired a re-enactment of the speech, read by Ian...

<p>Tell that fat bastard to go f**k himself.. Why do we give a sh*t..? Screw 'em all.</p> <p>More of that anon. But, before we get to those four-letter fanfares, half-a-century ago this month - April 1968 - something rather unusual happened in the UK Top 40: An American got to Number One.</p>

Well, the snow outside my New Hampshire window is below two-and-a-half foot, and so it must be time for the "summer" game. Baseball season is here, which means that baseball season's enduring blockbuster anthem is back for another summer of seventh-inning stretches, 110 years after it was introduced to the public in May 1908. "It's a tune that has all the color, all the swing, all the punch and feeling of the game," said Frank Sinatra, pinch-hitting for Bill Stern and guest-hosting Stern's "Colgate Sports Newsreel" in 1949. "It's the theme song of a great nation's national pastime, a diamond...

In the early hours of Saturday morning, US, UK and French forces struck Bashar Assad's regime in Syria. We'll see what, if anything, comes of that. One notes that Germany did not participate in the attacks - which is odd, considering that the most significant event in German life this last half-decade has been the arrival of millions of young, male so-called "Syrian" so-called "refugees" fleeing the chaos of "their" benighted land, and inflicting a whole lot on their Teuton hosts. On the other hand, unless I've missed a walk-back, Mutti Merkel's official position remains the more "refugees" the better....

In Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer, there is a short but memorable scene in which the narrator, Binx, perambulating through New Orleans, spots a genuine film star: Who should come out of Pirate's Alley half a block ahead of me but William Holden! Holden crosses Royal and turns toward Canal... No doubt he is on his way to Galatoire's for lunch. He is an attractive fellow with his ordinary good looks, very suntanned, walking along hands in pockets, raincoat slung over one shoulder. This is 1961. You'd know the "ordinary good looks" from The World of Suzie Wong and Bridge...

At a certain level, formerly functioning societies seem to be growing unnecessarily complicated. Yet, in a more basic sense, it's all coming together: Yesterday, as I was heading home after our live Clubland Q&A, it was all breaking news about the YouTube shooter. As usual in the first moments after such an attack, it's all tediously speculative - except for the apparent eyewitness report that the gunman was, in fact, a gunwoman. That, on the other hand, sent the breaking-news chappies boring down yet another dreary alley - that it was supposedly a YouTube employee upset with an ex-boyfriend. I...

Happy Easter and Happy Passover to our readers around the world. We moved our Saturday movie night to Good Friday for Mel Gibson's blockbuster The Passion Of The Christ. So, for the weekend proper, here's a special podcast, audiophonically adapted from an essay that appears in Mark's book A Song For The Season: the story of the most famous pop hit about Easter - sort of. Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade" has its beginnings in a very obscure chin-up song from the Great War written in 1917. In this audio special, Mark traces its origins as a First World War morale...

We're opening our weekend movie a little early this week, in time for Good Friday. On Saturday night we'll have another seasonal entertainment for you, but this is Mel Gibson's big blockbuster from fourteen Easters ago. Mel has spent the last decade getting a little crazier with every year that passes, and, surprisingly, there have been no attempts to follow the success of this film. But back in 2004 it was impressive not just cinematically but as an interesting business model for bypassing Hollywood: The headline on the Washington Post review summed it up: "'Passion' Is A Gory Take On...

John Bolton turned up on Fox about an hour before I did last night, and professed to be surprised by the sudden Tweeting of his appointment as US National Security Advisor. The Beltway insiders allege that it was rushed out to distract from Trump's cave-in on the 2,232-page Schumer-Pelosi Early-Christmas-For-Big-Bloated-Budget-Busting-Bureaucracy Bill that not a single person on this planet has actually read. Oh, and don't give me that "increased funding for our troops" straw-clutching: every sentient creature from the earthworm up knows that the extra dough's just going to go to diversity programs and gender reassignment surgery as opposed to...

Good Morning/Afternoon,MEGAMarkSteynOpensUpTheNewWeekUpWhileELRushBoGolfsForCharityDITTOS!

Exactly one week ago, at the Academy Awards, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand put the phrase "inclusion rider" into general circulation - and Matthew McWilliams, a first-day Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, wrote to propose one of those all-star medleys the Oscars used to do so well: Perhaps, Inclusion Rider (by Traffic), Inclusion Riders on the Storm (by The Doors), Midnight Inclusion Rider (by the Allman Brothers Band) and Low Inclusion Rider (by War). I'm open to other suggestions. Fellow Club member Bob Belvedere took up the challenge: All good choices. Perhaps, also: CC Inclusion Rider [by Chuck...