Here's a funny coincidence. Just as Netanyahu is hyperventilating against the interim deal Uncle Sam has struck with Iran in Geneva, a poster campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Berlin intended to identify aging Germans who might have participated in Nazi crimes has produced more than 3,000 ...

Is there anything better for Christmas than a bit of a laugh? Well, a visit by, say, the blonde CIA agent in Homeland would be preferable, but I think she's got other things on her mind than yours truly. Great comebacks are my favorites. For example: When the great French actress Arletty was ...

You know you’re old when people start writing kindly about you. Especially when they are colleagues. First Jeremy Clarke, now Deborah Ross. Debbie could of course be spoofing—if you look down at your bag of popcorn you’ll miss me—but thank you very much anyway. When my new boat is ready ...

Everyone’s doing it, so I might as well jump in also. After all, I knew so many of the people involved, including JFK and his widow Jackie, and—sorry for the name-drop—even actor Rob Lowe, who plays the slain president in the film that’s coming out for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s ...

I suppose the secret of death is to choose not to expire on the same day as famous people. I read in Lapham’s Quarterly that JFK, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley all met with the man in the white suit on November 22nd, 1963. John Jay Mortimer, a friend of very long standing, died last week and I ...

Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of Parliament and charged them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for ...

NEW YORK—Hot money from China, India, Russia, and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, ...

James Toback is a very intelligent screenwriter and director who discovered Harvey Keitel and also turned Mike Tyson into an actor of sorts, mostly playing Tyson. Toback relishes pushing people's buttons and has a devilish radar for psychodrama"€”all of which comes into play in his latest movie, ...

If, according to a Viennese wit, psychoanalysis is the disease that calls itself the cure, then Steve Cohen’s deal with the US government is the highway robbery that calls itself justice. Cohen is a bald Wall Street hedgie whose $18-billion fund, SAC, has scored Madoff-like returns the last ...

NEW YORK—He came from a wealthy background but was always in trouble. His parents were not particularly religious, but nevertheless they insisted that little Jimmy read the Torah scroll and grow up to be a good Jewish boy. You can imagine their horror when they found naked pictures of Hedy Lamarr ...