If there is another writer better at combining thought-provoking ideas with wry humor, I haven't discovered him. Mark Steyn's powers are on display in a must-read essay available in The New Criterion, discussing the decline in the civilizational will to live of the British, and by extension the entire Anglosphere, and the meaning for the future of the world. Despite it being a grim subject, Steyn's wit makes the reading a guilty pleasure.

Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and agreeable symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses and whatnot, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can't help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West-one with a sustained commitment to liberty and democracy-the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and, indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state), uniregal. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere.