This column’s posting the day of the midterms, and that’s all anyone’s gonna want to read about. But I’m more of a postmortem guy than a prediction guy (I gave up doing predictions after last month’s column “Liz ...
NEW YORK—Now that we have all these legal weed growers, plus all these legal middlemen making brownies and lozenges and Maryjane Chewies, plus all the legal weed shops in Colorado and Oregon and California and the ...
America's energy policy is in shambles. Current green solutions of solar and wind power, like tidal and geothermal power before them, have proved inadequate. We have lots of coal, but it's too dirty. The promise of nuclear ...
Desperately boring times, but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading very late into the night. And nonstop training and sport. What else can one do when locked in with ...
Beginning with Roger Fry's elevation of Vincent van Gogh to secular sainthood, the Dutch painter first became a middlebrow, then a mass-market, martyr. For those who find the Real Thing (or their idea of Him) inconveniently ...
Recently I spent a couple of days in Dubai-on-Thames, formerly known as London. The south bank of the river has been transformed by glass and steel buildings, second-rate even by the exacting standards of second-rateness ...
It's difficult to know which part of me to trust these days: my intuition or my own lying eyes. The glut of "fake news" filling the web doesn"t make it any easier. America's insatiable appetite for quick ...
A Department of Justice official recently announced that radical Islamists pose less of a threat to the country than "anti-government and hate groups." You heard right: Online trolls are a bigger danger than ...
Thousands of U.S. troops safeguard the border of South Korea. U.S. warships patrol the South China Sea to stand witness to the territorial claims of Asian allies against China. U.S. troops move in and out of the Baltic ...
When I was young I lived an idyllic life. I played sports, chased girls, and read novels. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John O"Hara, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, ...
I was not aware that there is a Spectator/Takimag fan club that meets in French-speaking Switzerland, and having contacted me we have agreed to meet this week up here in Gstaad. A very nice English voice over the telephone ...
For those who still try to draw parallels between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, allow me to explain: The Tea Party represents all the people working, producing, and PAYING for everything, while the Occupy movement ...
The Olympics are a festival of human biodiversity. Different sports are best-suited to different body types: For example, swimmer Michael Phelps, winner of 23 gold medals, and eight-time gold-medalist sprinter Usain Bolt ...
Mail-order catalogs (except of antiquarian books) are not my favorite reading, and yet we can learn something from them, even from those that hold no other interest for us. For example, the other day I looked into such a ...
“Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged election,” said Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Saturday. The stunned recoil in this city suggests this bunker buster went right down the chimney. As ...
This is the kind of article one writes with Kinky Friedman blasting in the background, and that's how it is meant to be read. Otherwise, the experience might prove a little too painful. So crank up "Homo Erectus," ...
Romy Somerset is the sweetest, nicest young girl in London. She’s also my goddaughter, and I remember during her christening at Badminton years ago the present duke’s mother staring at me rather intensely while the ...
On Christmas Day I sat by the fire in my house in France and read a charming little book, Tea With Walter de la Mare, by Russell Brain, published in 1957. Walter de la Mare, who died age 83 in 1956, was a poet, novelist, ...
And all at once, a sigh of relief could be heard in boardrooms across the globe. The French presidential election ended not with a bang, or a whimper, but beads of perspiration being wiped off the brows of the global ...
There is compulsory entertainment almost everywhere these days, even in public lavatories. It shadows you like a secret policeman. I would dislike this even if I had not reached the age when urination required some ...
You know the difference between an album and a concert? With an album, the idea is to create something with staying power. The music is meticulously recorded, mixed, sweetened, and preserved for repeated play. An album is ...
Sometimes, the monotony is the message. All weekly opinion journalists eventually encounter the problem of repeated themes. It’s unavoidable. Specifics might change, political circumstances might change, but opinion ...
The “progressive” group Color of Change seems to have succeeded in its long-running campaign to get Pat Buchanan kicked off MSNBC. It had been lobbying for the conservative commentator’s departure since last October, ...
Lemme tell ya a story ’bout a guy named Irv Rubin. Ran a little something called the Jewish Defense League. The JDL was dedicated to battling the “enemies of the Jewish people,” which sometimes meant Ay-rabs, ...
