Landed Fortunes
"There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th century fiction than the legacy." So writes a female columnist in Britain's best newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, and then goes on to say some rude things about ...
"There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th century fiction than the legacy." So writes a female columnist in Britain's best newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, and then goes on to say some rude things about ...
Tuesday last, April 12, one hundred and fifty years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 34 hours, and ...
The New York Times seemed to think it was bitterly ironic that some of the students at Santa Fe High School, site of the recent mass shooting, had staged a walkout last month in support of the Parkland, Florida, students. ...
“Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. ... One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.” So ...
Eric Holder’s Justice Department has completed its investigation into whether Ferguson cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in cold blood for racist reasons when he shot the black teenager last August. What did the ...
The Obama Administration has declared war on school bullies. The Department of Education recently issued guidelines to prevent what Secretary Arne Duncan called bullying's devastating impact on schools. Conferences have ...
A woman in Indiana was recently found asphyxiated to death by a snake—a reticulated python—still wrapped round her neck. This was a death so horrible that you avert your mind from imagining it too closely. In England ...
For the first time since Ronald Reagan flew via helicopter off into history in January 1989, I have felt enthusiastic about a US president. To my tremendous"and short-lived"surprise, Barack Hussein Obama evoked this ...
So Egypt is over. Oh, we"ll hear snippets and see some snapshots, but make no mistake, Egypt is over. Why, you ask? Is it because peace is restored? (Hardly.) Is it because democracy has won? (Highly dubious.) Is it ...
It would be difficult to imagine a greater example of oblivious stupidity and hubris than Jeffrey Sach and Bandy Lee’s recent article for Project Syndicate, “Trump’s Psychopathology Is Getting Worse.” Having read ...
Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together. In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and ...
The rich are under attack nowadays, nowhere more than in America, where the Donald continues to trump his critics, amaze and surprise his fans, and drive his haters to paroxysms of sexual fantasies, with Trump as the main ...
Ah, reality! That mysterious, untouchable world of mass and energy, of gravity and fire, of genes and synapses. It lurks out of sight beyond our reach, knowable to us only by the occasional fragments that impinge on our ...
I had my weekend nicely planned. Saturday: small catch-up stuff, paperwork, and household repairs. Sunday: Write a book review I’d promised for midnight deadline...oh, and read the book. Friday afternoon a friend ...
CORONIS—We are steaming on Puritan toward the private isle of Coronis for a long Pugs weekend and the boozing is easy. Sir Bob Geldof is lecturing on everything and anything and the listening is even easier. After three ...
For more than 50 years, our country has been engaged in systemic discrimination against the nation's most despised racial group, whites. Recently, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging legal race discrimination in a ...
A naked, very good-looking young man skied down the mountain, evoking shrieks of laughter and admiration from the hundred or so skiers lining the slopes. He turned out to be J.T., my son, and it was an act of protest ...
People tend to embrace whatever political ideology justifies their existence. Since I feel like a working-class Tonka Toy born with a 350-cubic-inch, 4-barrel-carb, V8 brain under the hood, a meritocracy makes the most ...
What’s the deal with white people? [the almost entirely white audience laughs] I mean, right—like, what the hell? [more laughter] Like, I mean, we’ve told nothing BUT “white people” jokes for the past two ...
My end-of-the-year Christmas party was the best yet. The festivities began at 10PM and ended somewhat hazily around 6 the next morning. My son JT provided the youth and I provided the gravitas. Actually it was the other way ...
It can be safely assumed that Morad Almuradi will not come to Munich anytime soon. Because Morad delivered, and for this we should be truly grateful, a hilarious coup de grâce to the incessantly touted notion that ...
"Oh, Jerry, don"t let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." I"m pre-crying. TCM's running a 24/7 Bette Davis marathon today, and although Now, Voyager (1942) isn"t starting for six more hours (and ...
NEW YORK—March 1, 2018, will go down as the day New York officially became a Museum City. I don’t mean a city full of great museums, I mean a city that’s become a museum. That was the day the Metropolitan Museum ...
Comedy was on my mind last week, for three coincidental reasons. Reason No. 1: Jowly failed 1980s stand-up “comedian” Dana Gould called me a Holocaust denier. I was commenting in a Twitter thread about how Gould is the ...
