The Week That Perished
The Week’s Most Higgling, Niggling, and Wiggling Headlines PLEASE ROCK HAMMER DON’T HURT ’EM I must admit, I didn’t think much of Andy Dufresne the first time I laid eyes on him. Looked like a stiff breeze would ...
The Week’s Most Higgling, Niggling, and Wiggling Headlines PLEASE ROCK HAMMER DON’T HURT ’EM I must admit, I didn’t think much of Andy Dufresne the first time I laid eyes on him. Looked like a stiff breeze would ...
The Week’s Most Degrading, Upbraiding, and Ukraine-Invading Headlines WAG THE DOG-EARED In a 2004 episode of The Wire, drug kingpin and would-be legitimate businessman Stringer Bell gets “rainmade” by shifty city ...
There is a striking passage in Edith Hamilton’s study The Echo of Greece (1957) that reads like a description of America in 2018. Reflecting on the decline of democracy in ancient Athens, the great classicist tells us ...
Last Tuesday night, a fat, rumpled, unemployed 56-year-old man named Clay Duke invaded a Florida school-board meeting and put on a clumsy show of violent political theater before killing himself. Duke brandished a gun, ...
NEW YORK—Remember when the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era of transparency and knowledgeable bliss? These gizmos make George Orwell’s 1984 redundant, no ...
“It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) Long ago, in a universe of sane fiscal policy far, far away, there existed an institution, then new to the world of ...
CASTING STONES Oliver Stone's son has converted to Islam and is now the righteous Sean Ali Stone. The young Stone adopted his new religion last week in a bid to foster peace among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Stone is ...
Rains finally came. The dog days came to a pause for two days, but Bucharest was still hot. We drove to Tulcea"the quiet of a small town in a poor province on a summer afternoon"and took the speedboat to Chilia, ...
A reader has registered surprise that I am not an atheist. I am surprised that he’s surprised. Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe and a moral creature created in God’s image, makes sense to scientists far ...
Donald Trump has stumbled and fallen, and the establishment is not going to let slip this last opportunity to stomp him and his movement to death. On Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a startling ultimatum: Either Vice ...
At what point do you call a man a brute? The governor of New York has reached that point. He is a brute. With less feeling and regret than would follow stepping on a cockroach, the governor has, to the plaudits of ...
Herman Cain is under attack, so why aren’t the Hollyweirdos flocking to his aid? Why won’t Alec Baldwin stop pimping Capital One credit cards long enough to help a brotha out? Back when Obama was questioned about his ...
“Buy now, pay later!” The advertising slogan for a credit card put me in mind of the title of the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s satire Sylvie and Bruno: “Less bread, more taxes!” The credit card offered ...
The demise of The Weekly Standard was a pleasure, not because I like to see print magazines go down the drain—to the contrary—but because of its parentage, William Kristol and John Podhoretz. These two unpleasant ...
Back in the good old days, when Ike and Mamie lived in the White House"and the neocons were an ugly bunch of short bald people meeting in New York dumps discussing the greatness of Leon Trotsky"summertime spelled ...
Last December I penned a column about a controversy that was at the time raging in one of the very last black areas of L.A., the Crenshaw district. There was a mall—known locally as the Crenshaw Mall, but properly titled ...
NEW YORK—So I’m riding the downtown E train somewhere between 34th and 4th when one of New York’s mentally deranged performance artists starts reading loudly from a tattered typewritten manuscript that he’s ...
CHELSEA, LONDON, U.K.—Oh, to be in England, but let’s start at the beginning. I challenge any reader to claim they are more technologically disadvantaged than yours truly, or anyone not suffering from Alzheimer’s in ...
The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th century in my possession. In them, the sole ...
The Week’s Most Supernova, Apache Cordova, and Shana Tova Headlines YO’ MAMA KIPPUR For Jews, these are the High Holy Days, the period of getting atoned between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. For blacks, these are the ...
Long before I started writing about politics, I learned one important lesson: What is said to be inevitable doesn’t necessarily happen. Way back in 1965 I read a book by the distinguished American columnist Richard ...
The most famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel of a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes, and it is “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” I ...
A recent syndicated column by Michelle Malkin indicates what happens to interesting conservative commentators when they sign on as GOP flacks: They become predictable Republican mouthpieces and attack dogs against the Dems. ...
Wow, what a week. London may be bad for one’s health, but it sure makes it fun on the way to where we’re all going. I’m determined not to mention Greece—too much has been written about my poor country, most of it ...
