GSTAAD—Six hours into the New Year, and already there was trouble. My own bash to welcome 2011 with fifty of my nearest and dearest finished around 5 a.m., so I rolled down toward the Palace hotel still looking for some action. I had a very pretty German girl in tow, my son’s friend Fiona, so I ...
OK. Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change. During the last week of November, in Portland Oregon, the F.B.I. arrested a Somali born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in a public square full of ...
NEW YORK—This is a bad time of year for atheists. So much so, they are showing signs of desperation. In the cesspool that is Uncle Sam’s capital, an unusual Christmas message began appearing last week on the sides of buses and trains: “NO GOD?…NO PROBLEM!” Two hundred and seventy of these ...
This is in praise of younger men. An outrage will take place at Preston Crown Court on January 7, 2011, when beautiful 27-year-old ballet teacher Sarah Pirie will be sentenced for an “improper relationship with a 15-year-old” who was not named (unlucky chappie) for obvious reasons. In my ...
The death of anyone well known - especially in New York - invokes more clichés than you know what draws flies in summer. Every obituary I read about Elaine included the words, "icon", "brassy", "landmark", "true New Yorker", and other such epithets. Let’s ...
The irony is such that the word itself loses meaning. The ultimate Afghan con man, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is someone Hollywood couldn’t make up. A catch-him-if-you-can type of script wouldn’t make it past the first rewrite. Even “based on a true story” wouldn’t help. If it ...
NEW YORK—Actor Harvey Keitel and I are good friends and we go way back. For any of you who hate movies and Hollywood as I do, Keitel is your man. He was on Broadway for ten years and then made Mean Streets, the first of many gritty films with Robert De Niro depicting young Italian toughs around ...
NEW YORK—Tony Judt was a very clever and learned Brit who taught in the Big Bagel and died last August from that dreaded Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was extremely brave until the end, writing and lecturing from his wheelchair—so convincingly that some nice guys banned him from speaking just ...
NEW YORK—This is a good time to be in the Bagel. Walking briskly under changing autumn skies amid colors that still carry their summer clothes is inspiring. Heaven knows I need it. Early morning means judo training—hangover or not—and in foggy days I walk as if in a trance through the park, ...
I began thinking about this column one week before I noticed that Craig Brown had pinched it. He had actually written what I meant to write one week before I decided to write it, which I guess cannot be called plagiarism merely because I had thought of it first. (If I had, that is.) It’s about ...
