///. . . BY: VIC MATUS JUN 28 2026 -------------------- Speaking of vindication, our senior writer Ira Stoll reviews The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior by Jonathan Daly. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Jb-Z!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb06272a0-42f5-4e5a-98d7-5ecfb6c89b55_703x491.jpeg Pipes had an office in Widener Library next door to his Harvard history department colleague, Bernard Bailyn. (A footnote in the book reports that in the late 1980s, Bailyn ‘gently chided’ Ned Keenan, then chairman of the department, ‘for sporting a polo shirt in the History Department library one summer.’) Bailyn’s great scholarly contribution was to debunk the idea that the American Revolution was economically, rather than ideologically, motivated. Pipes’s great scholarly contribution was to debunk the idea that the Russian Revolution was economically motivated rather than being a coup by Bolshevik thugs. While they both made strong evidence-based historical cases, they both also brought to the source material, consciously or unconsciously, a baseline strong-skepticism-verging-on-disbelief of the idea that anyone would find the vastness of someone else’s wealth upsetting enough to die in a revolution for. “Pipes had what he called a commitment ‘to spread a moral message, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences.’ A historian, he said, ‘should not be afraid of passing judgment where moral issues are at stake as they often are.’ Pipes himself fled the Nazi advance on Poland as a teenager with his immediate family, to Italy and then America, in 1939 and 1940. So it was, one senses, of more than narrowly academic interest when Pipes wrote about Stalin, who ‘on a single day … sent death sentences for 5,000 people who had never been tried after which he went to his private Kremlin movie theater to enjoy two films, one of them a comedy called Merry Fellows.’ “In some ways a more interesting question than why Pipes got it right is why so many others got it wrong. Daly quotes Pipes in 1995 warning that left-wing intellectuals used the press ‘to spread a mood of self-doubt: to project their own discontent on the population at large.’ The full contribution, in Commentary, concludes with this gem: ‘The intellectuals’ Weltschmerz, fortunately, reflects only their own personal Welt and their own personal Schmerz.’ I had to look up the meaning, but is there a more succinct summation, accurate analysis, or dismissive diagnosis?” From classrooms in Cambridge to a bar in Boston, Rob Long remembers Cheers co-creator and television legend James Burrows, who died on June 19. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!t-_s!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F81845b63-82ed-4356-94ae-cf380816ba26_736x490.jpeg Jimmy was a child of show business ... and had grown up in a house filled with stars and music and parties where famous grownups would smoke and drink and laugh and ask little Jimmy to play the piano. He grew up to have a string of hits of his own—Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, Big Bang Theory—but even when he was directing multi-camera comedies for a modern audience, he was never too far away from the Broadway stage. “Jimmy spoke in an old-timey show-biz argot. ... When he sensed the audience was losing the thread of the story, he’d remind us to put some sunny Spain at the top. Meaning: We needed a little recap to keep the audience engaged, like in those moments in Shakespeare when two characters walk onstage and announce Here we are in sunny Spain so that everyone shivering in the London gloom at the Old Globe knew exactly where they were supposed to be. “That’s how he directed television: like it wasn’t television at all, but an off-Broadway comedy. He would rehearse for a few days, get the show up on its feet, guide the writers through revisions and adjustments, and only then would he think about cameras and shots and how he was going to film the episode. The result is that all of his shows have the same loose, spontaneous liveliness. Characters are always entering and exiting and sitting and crossing, with the cameras often barely keeping up. If you think about the Cheers bar, or the Big Bang Theory living room, or the coffee shop in Friends—you feel like you’e there too, just a little bit offscreen. “On most multi-camera comedy sets, each camera is hooked up to a bank of monitors which allows the director—and everyone else on the set, which includes the writers and producers and studio executives and network vice presidents—to watch each angle of every scene and make every frame perfect. It’s called the ‘quad split’ and on my seventh (or maybe eighth) day in show business I learned that Jimmy Burrows did not use a quad split. The audience doesn’t watch the shots, he said to me when I asked why. They watch the show.” Will anyone be watching Supergirl? John Podhoretz gives us a review. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u4y8!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18953c7-0401-4a51-a9a9-0d93d03b62d1_662x328.png “At the end of the reboot of Superman released last year, we were introduced to his cousin Kara, a.k.a. Supergirl. While Clark Kent is the same square and noble fellow he has always been, Kara turns out to be a wild child, a teenage party animal on a perpetual bender. That amusing conception of the character made me optimistic that Supergirl might be a gas. Nope. “Kara’s wild-child antics, it turns out, are part of her effort to cope with the haunting trauma of having lived through the destruction of Krypton. Since she doesn’t feel at home on Earth, she boozes it up all over the galaxy instead. But she is having absolutely no fun doing it, and we have absolutely no fun watching it, and Milly Alcock, the young Australian actress playing her, is having no fun playing it. That’s even more the case when she ends up in the middle of a fifth-rate version of Mad Max: Fury Road, featuring a gang of marauders that kidnaps a bunch of young women led by a guy with a lot of metal buttons in his face and a Russian accent, for some unknown reason. If you want to see some motorcycles and trucks driving around on the surface of a spaceship that is floating over a big lake, this movie is for you. I can’t think of who else it could possibly be for. “Marvel’s movies since Endgame have ranged from the mostly amusing (Shang-Chi and the Legend of Something or Other) to the unspeakably awful (Eternals) to the profoundly disappointing (The Fantastic Four). This actually provided DC with an opening both creatively and financially, and it sought to capitalize on that opening by hiring the inspired writer-director of Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn, to take charge of its cinematic slate. Gunn did pretty well with that Superman and has a sequel to it called Man of Tomorrow coming next year, but after this debacle, Gunn should temper any positive expectations. The lousiness of Supergirl (which he oversaw but neither wrote nor directed) means that whatever goodwill Gunn built up through the clever casting of David Corenswet as Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane will have long since dissipated by the time his second go-round hits theaters.” Happy Sunday. Vic Matus Arts & Culture Editor Washington Free Beacon Thanks for reading the Washington Free Beacon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Subscribed