With publication of On The Road in 1957, Jack Kerouac became an overnight celebrity"€”not just famous, but a phenomenon. The experience brought him to another level of confusion, self-doubt, and hard drinking. Kerouac had walked into Robert Giroux’s office in 1951 with a 120-foot Teletype ...

Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees was published in 1950 to terrible reviews, but I recall that at some point in the past I thought Across the River was the best book he had ever written. Then I picked it up again recently and started reading. It is the book’s ...

A recent Financial Times arts podcast predicts that we are headed for another outburst of Great Gatsby mania. A new movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic will be released on Christmas Day starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. Here’s the ...

We are facing another US presidential election. The two candidates have been picked, most likely by hand. It is depressing how fast these contests come around and how similar and pointless they have become. It seems like only yesterday I was recovering from the 2008 campaign between Senators Obama ...

Our Peace Prize president lobbed some harsh words toward Iran in his long-winded pep rally last Tuesday night: Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies.  From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t ...

Should we seek the deeper meaning in the video of US Marines urinating on Taliban combatants’ dead bodies in the wilds of Afghanistan? What does it tell us about our country? What does it say about Washington and the hypocrites in charge of the lone surviving superpower? What does it ...

My executive editor at a Florida magazine, Hardy Burt, informed me at lunch one day, “God is a girl!” This was after his first vodka martini. I can’t imagine what we were discussing. He may have been right. It would be nice to think so. He appeared to be dead serious. He was much ...

Last week brought news of a purported Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador to the US Adel al-Jubeir, but the whole murder-for-hire story may have already imploded by the time you read this. Skepticism is rampant. Aside from the insufferable, trigger-happy neocons, nobody who knows anything ...

The protracted Mideast “peace process” has finally hit the Iron Wall. The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has wandered off the reservation and is taking the Palestinian question to the UN. It’s about time. The much-ballyhooed, American-sponsored “peace ...

With the 9/11 anniversary upon us once again, Middle East expert Robert Fisk in Beirut has written an instructive article about our predicament. He says that we have lied to ourselves for 10 years to avoid asking the one real question: Why did it happen? Without motive, there would have been no ...