charmed circle

The St. Petersburg tycoon has for years been part of a charmed circle of Russian oligarchs with close ties to President Putin.

By the 1990s, Mr. Jakes had joined the charmed circle of America’s big-name authors — among them Mary Higgins Clark, Tom Wolfe, James Clavell, Thomas Harris and Ira Levin — whose publishers paid millions in advances for multi-book deals, although they had only vague ideas what the books might say.

Whenever the right is forced to yield or capitulate, it seeks to reorder the terms of debate, allowing some who were previously excluded into the charmed circle.

How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins?

The central political question is not to how to change it but how to adapt to it, to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of elite professionals.