A Paean to Pamplona
In 2009 I first came to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I was terrified in that complete and overwhelming way that total ignorance brings, standing on a street corner and waiting for death to come. I comported myself ...
In 2009 I first came to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I was terrified in that complete and overwhelming way that total ignorance brings, standing on a street corner and waiting for death to come. I comported myself ...
Apart from "rogue" politicians like Geert Wilders, Europeans leaders seem only willing to speak of the problem of dismal birth rates in the Old World by resorting to euphemism and wishful thinking. Faced with its ...
I wouldn’t recognize stock manipulation or accountancy fraud at its most blatant, but it doesn’t surprise me when others discover it. After murder, fraud was one of the first crimes committed by mankind. Jacob indulged ...
Almost twenty years ago, a young man called Faiz Siddique went up to Brasenose College, Oxford to read Modern History. When he came to sit his finals he was disappointed to get only a 2:1 degree rather than a first. It ...
Rarely have second terms lived up to the hopes and expectations of presidents or their electorates. FDR’s began with an attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices and a second Depression of 1937. He was ...
The Week’s Most Neurotic, Quixotic, and Antipsychotic Headlines GOO’BYE GOOMBAH Watching Andrew Cuomo go down (and not in the way he enjoys) is kinda like watching the fall of Al Capone (an observation made by Twitter ...
Menstruation is having a moment. I don"t mean the fleshly, goopy one that vexes roughly half the human race. Periods, while remaining annoyingly corporeal, are once again oozing into the conceptual realm too, thanks to ...
The Week’s Most Erratic, Phlegmatic, and Morganatic Headlines BEVERLY HILLS FLOP It was the brazen daytime robbery that froze Beverly Hills in its tracks. Last March, a trio of thugs descended upon an outdoor dining ...
It says a lot about the vulgar character of our time that The New Republic would publish an article called “Why Has the World Gone Easy on Cristiano Ronaldo?” The soccer star is under investigation for an alleged rape ...
In John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family's midst by posing as Sidney Poitier's son, who had just happened to lose his wallet. The guilt-ridden ...
This ought to be a golden age of the social sciences. The immense reduction in the cost of DNA testing is allowing massive assaults on the most venerable conundrums of nature vs. nurture, such as whether the IQ gap between ...
How was your May Day? Mine was all right. Actually, that's not true. It started off left, turned right, stayed right, and then went left again. I went to an OWS protest, sent out some charity T-shirts for Andrew Breitbart's ...
I switch personalities at Spectator parties, depending on who the guests are: For our readers’ tea party, I am a warm and gracious semi-host, swigging scotch but graciously answering questions about my drinking, love ...
A conservative author remarked to me a few days ago, “Between Kanye and the Jews, and the City Council Mexicans and the blacks, it’s been the Cole Cinematic Universe this week.” Indeed, many familiar notes; this’ll ...
GSTAAD—Okay, sports fans, it’s time to spill the beans. Sometime last year I wrote about rich man’s kickboxing, the art of punching and kicking at someone holding up pads, the best conditioner I know if done correctly ...
Compared with the slum dwellers of São Paulo who erect their own shacks in a day or two, the average French (or British) architect is a complete aesthetic illiterate and incompetent, or perhaps moron would be a better word ...
Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak show. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan ...
Guardian journalist Zoe Williams is worried. "Is the left in Britain still alive and well?" she asks. Apparently, "no one quite knows where it has gone, or what it looks like." There is, she fears, a cosmic ...
The Fifth French Republic was the creation of General de Gaulle. Contemptuous of what he called the "regime of the parties," which saw weak governments come and go and the same politicians return to office through a ...
Are Catholic truths immutable? Or can they change with the changing times? This is the deeper question behind the issues that convulsed the three-week synod on the family of the 250 Catholic bishops in Rome that ended ...
Last night while seated in the La Maestranza bullring of Seville to watch the great matador José Marà Manzanares dance with and dispatch six bulls, I was reminded why I became so fascinated by the spectacle we ...
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, “when inequality is the common law of a society, the strongest inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on a level, the least of them wound it. That is why the ...
At the end of the Cold War, conservatives found themselves in a state of disunity and intellectual ferment. The neoconservative faction demanded a continuation of the Cold War model of interventionist foreign policy and ...
The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair, 9th Marquess of Londonderry, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith fifteen ...
