It is said, invariably with a sigh and in mournful tones, that the press is biased"a proposition I find puzzling. The press is supposed to have a bias. Complaining that a newspaper is not objective is like complaining about a fish's incessant swimming all over the place: "Can"t it sit ...
A prosperous, roly-poly Greek with a name that sounds like an Aztec root vegetable once proclaimed that if you have a brain, A cannot be both A and not A. Some twenty-one centuries later, a bookworm-poor, reed-thin, dark-cloaked Dane who for most of his life had been unhappy in love replied that if ...
Avant-garde is an epidemic. From modern architecture—an added misfortune, like a hunchback struck down by elephantiasis—there is simply no escape, as its creedal symbols pursue me all over the European continent like the fiends of America's cinematographic industry or the ...
A pair of Siamese twins in formaldehyde, provided the liquid was a shocking pink and the infants were joined together in some particularly disturbing manner, would have made for a suitable exhibit in one of the tents, as doubtless would the picture, foreshadowed in the story by Saki, of the hyenas ...
In the 1930s even some of the older and more intellectual Russians, including those who had seen a bit of the world in their youth, believed that the United States was the land of the Yellow Devil, meaning gold. It was said that when one American met another in the street, he greeted him as ...
Anybody who has ever made merry by leafing through an issue of Cosmopolitan knows that today's successful young woman is happily married yet still happier single, that she stands by her man yet has many lovers, that she is virtuous yet possessed of a whole lot of outrageously expensive shoes, ...
Even in some of my saner moments, however, I can detect within myself a tendency of character that transforms me into a kind of Taki of the Gutter. Thus I may be the only writer you will ever read who has met both Paris Hilton and David Frum, a fact I adduce here with neither pride nor shame, ...
Stalin, who espoused the profound rationalism of a Constitution that made socially useful labour into universal law, lost out on Europe's scientific genius and therefore on world domination. So did Hitler, who espoused no less remarkable a rationalism of his very own. History has shown that ...
I am not saying that we must all turn to Eastern mysticism, or try walking on water after a heavy lunch, or even be portrayed by Francis Bacon in attitudes expressive of inner torment. But come on, live a little! Let the careless child burn his fingers playing with matches. Let the faithful ...
