GSTAAD—Joan Didion, who died December last, took herself extremely seriously. American writers tend to do that, especially those whose books are unreadable, the kind that win prizes and get reviewed by the Bagel Times. Pretension aside, however, Didion was a hell of a writer, a stylist who ...

During the late ’50s I was on the European tennis circuit and was ranked among the lowest. I was No. 3 in Greece but back then Greece was hardly a tennis power, unlike today (No. 4 among men and 6 among women). In 1957 the American Althea Gibson won Wimbledon and became the first black player to ...

GSTAAD—Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: Did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with discussing privilege is it turns in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those ...

GSTAAD—According to a little bird Boris has gone from brilliant to bawd, and according to me this village has gone from unlivable to perfect in one easy week. The slopes are empty, the snow is excellent, the restaurants now take reservations, and the slobs are visible but not dominant in town. If ...

GSTAAD—Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black-and-white TV? Actually it was yours truly after watching the slobs parading up and down Gstaad’s main street. That was last year, but the bad news is that this year Slobbovia has come to stay. Mind you, Alexandra and I had ...

A revisionist-historian-anthropologist-anarchist, whose name is not important because his works are based on personal assumptions and prejudices, insists in a book he co-wrote before his recent death that agriculture was to blame for the sorry state humanity finds itself in at present. According to ...

GSTAAD—It is hard to imagine we have reached the year 2022 and still impose completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. By “we” I mean those of us in the supposedly enlightened West, where silliness, jealousy, cruelty, and wokeness rule the roost. I’ll begin with the Chinese virus ...

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman, and never recovered his faculties again. It was the autumn of 1888. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and ...

Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper of its most populous city launches a totally mendacious project reinterpreting its past. The practice was perfected during the old communist system that ruled Romania, Hungary, Poland, and the rest of the Soviet satellites. But it is no longer ...

NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are now a thing of the past, at least here in the Bagel, so it’s home sweet home for the poor little Greek boy, for dinner, drinks, and even some dancing at times. Here in my Bagel house ...