There is a little Italian restaurant that we usually go to soon after our arrival in Paris, an unpretentious place where the pasta is good. It has a friendly atmosphere, and by now we are frequent enough customers to be greeted as friends. The patronne allows her children, aged about 7 and 9, when ...

The following sentence ought to be enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine, at least if it accurately reflects a reality: US attorneys plan to extract a multi-billion-dollar payment from crypto exchange Binance in exchange for discontinuing their criminal investigation of it. In other words, ...

The process of auto-beatification among the educated in the West seems more prevalent than ever. Possessed, as they believe, of knowledge, wisdom, and generosity, they believe also that they are the conscience of society who therefore ought rightly play a directing role in it. They have what Thomas ...

Recently, a Belgian politician did something unusual for a modern politician: He acted almost honorably. He was the Minister of Justice when two Swedish football supporters were shot dead in Brussels by a Tunisian Islamist, Abdelsalam Lassoued, age 45. Lassoued had been a common criminal in ...

The character of Sam Bankman-Fried continues to intrigue, not so much because it is remarkable in itself, but because he managed to inveigle so much money out of so many people who were supposedly sophisticated and hard-nosed. I suppose this is evidence that the desire to make a fast buck is among ...

Is it a sign of advancing age that the world seems to grow more absurd by the day, or does the world really grow more absurd by the day? If the latter, it means that there is an objective measure of absurdity, which I doubt. Be that as it may, I was riding to Charles de Gaulle Airport in a taxi ...

Two days before flying to Turkey for a few days, I found a little book published in 1944 titled La Turquie d’Ismet Ineunu (The Turkey of Ismet Inonu). It was published by Fernand Sorlot not long before the end of the Occupation. Fernand Sorlot was the publisher who had been sued by Hitler in the ...

The worst enemy of the West is itself, and the same goes for our democracy. We are so arrogantly certain of our survival and superiority, we in the Western democracies, that we never give a moment’s thought to how we appear to others. We don’t have to do so, we think, because of our inherent ...

Like several other countries in the West, Britain has given up on the sordid and vulgar activity of making things and instead gone in for the more refined and sophisticated life of service industries. In the case of Britain, however, there is a particular problem: The people are not very good at ...

One of my few remaining ambitions is to catalog my library—if that is not too grand a word for my accumulation of books. Certainly, I have known municipal libraries with fewer volumes, especially now as they can’t wait to dispose of those encumbrances and obstructors of computer ...