Hello friends of the Spectator! My neighborhood in Denver, Colorado, USA is called Capitol Hill, and the golden dome of its namesake sits imperiously three blocks from my lovely 1918 building, with three stories of balconies overlooking Pennsylvania Street, next to the home of Molly Brown, Denver’s notable from theRead More

Editor’s Note: Spectator contributor Shay Carlstrom returns after an extended absence with some thoughts on the ongoing Democratic presidential primary in the United States and we are delighted to have him back.   As the state of campaigning in American presidential elections now seem to be permanent, it is lessRead More

Occasionally, it takes us a while to accept something that is hard to understand, does not jibe with our script of the world, or plainly, just doesn’t make any damn sense. And I am here to say now, finally, over a month into this springtime of our discontent, that IRead More

Perhaps the only thing uniting the electorate of the United States in the last days before our presidential election is a sort of bemused disbelief at where we are and how we got here. Calls for imprisoning political opponents, refusals to accept election results, and unabashed jingoism are actions AmericansRead More

American presidential elections are not won at the base of either party. The dichotomy of the two major American parties has historically rested on a fairly centrist pivot, where roughly 40% of both Republicans and Democrats can be found. This loose crowd in the center, unpinned by party affiliation orRead More

American presidential elections are not won at the base of either party. The dichotomy of the two major American parties has historically rested on a fairly centrist pivot, where roughly 40% of both Republicans and Democrats can be found. This loose crowd in the center, unpinned by party affiliation orRead More

The roller coaster metaphor so often applied to US presidential campaigns has never been as apt as it is this season—the jerking motions, the nausea, the anxiety, the precarious swings from left to right, the tunnel-vision as one dives into a screaming chasm before lurching back up into the shrillRead More

American grocery stores are season-less palaces, replete with six-foot sections of a single product in every hue or state of naturalness; catering to what seems to be a national pandemic of Celiac disease. Whether you want fruit that fell of its own accord or that boasts a color unseen outsideRead More

Explaining to folks abroad from whence I come, I often had to resort to “One of the square states.” In recent years, though, a law known as Amendment 64 has put Colorado on the international map as the vanguard of full legalization and regulation of both medical and recreational marijuana.Read More

The Spectator has recruited some actual Americans living in the actual United States of America to provide insight into the 2016 US presidential election. We kick off this week with a recap of the conventions and a discussion of the US electoral map with our eye in Denver, Colorado, ShayRead More