The great reactionary novelist Evelyn Waugh owned a country house in Combe Florey, southwest England. Among the furnishings was a set of three paintings under the collective title The Pleasures of Travel: 1751, 1851, 1951. The first painting shows the interior of a stagecoach carrying two men and ...
Otto von Bismarck is said to have proposed the following solution to the Irish Question: Move all the Irish to Holland and all the Dutch to Ireland. With their industriousness, sobriety, and civic virtue, the Dutch would soon have Ireland thriving. The Irish, meanwhile, would be so busy drinking ...
Barack Obama's election was an anomaly, a lurch backward. It defied the apparently inevitable and stood athwart history crying, "Stop!" It has been clear for at least ten or fifteen years that the public-finance structure prevalent through the 20th century's second half in all Western ...
Well, not really a musical, nor even the lyrics to a musical. The piece under discussion is, though, definitely not plain prose; so musical-wise, we have the beginnings of a start here. I am referring to Tim Wise’s furious rant on Daily Kos the other day under the title “An Open Letter ...
Adolf Hitler featured so repeatedly and tiresomely in the British newspapers during the late 1930s that the Daily Express ran a story about him under the headline “It’s That Man Again.” (The headline was so well known it was picked up in 1939 for the title of a radio comedy show ...
As I may have mentioned, I have a friend who sends me links to New York Times pieces she thinks I might find interesting. Those occasional snippets aside, I don’t read the Times. Why mess with my digestion at this stage of life? Last Sunday, however, a friend was giving me a lift from ...
I hadn’t heard of John Edgar Wideman before reading his October 6 op-ed in The New York Times. Googling around, I see that he is the author of many books, both fiction (12 novels, six short-story collections) and nonfiction (memoirs, basketball, and social commentary). He is 69 years old, ...
The Tyler Clementi case has been illuminating in several respects. Clementi was a Rutgers University freshman, sharing a dorm room with another 18-year-old, Dharun Ravi. Clementi asked for sole use of the room until midnight on September 19. Ravi obliged and went to his female friend Molly Wei's ...
The oh-my-god political news story of recent weeks in this neck of the woods was a September 22 poll showing Carl Paladino just six points behind Andrew Cuomo among likely voters in the New York governor’s race. Cuomo, the Democrat, is a lifetime professional pol, as his father had been ...
In case you haven’t caught any of the buzz about the movie, or seen Steve Sailer’s review, Waiting for Superman is a 2-hour documentary deploring the state of our public schools, and suggesting ways that public education might be improved. The movie is framed around five children, four ...
