In October 2001, a few hours after the American military landed in Afghanistan to avenge the terrorist attacks that had emanated from that country one month prior, a young British officer softly walked from his barstool in ...
The Week’s Most Griefing, Debriefing, and Autumn-Leafing Headlines PRINCESS OF WHALES Nobody’s saying Rolling Stone film critic Katie Rife is fat, but her dress size is IMAX. Nobody’s saying she’s heavy, but any ...
The Week’s Most Commie, Pommy, and Flowers-for-Mommy Headlines THE FUN-HOUSE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES You’ll get a bigger hand if you can stand on your head, Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown! A Cole Porter song is the ...
It's probable that few of us in the West have much time for either Saudi Arabia or Qatar. There are exceptions, of course. Our governments treat them as useful allies in the disturbed Middle East, Saudi Arabia especially ...
Opera has been in the news lately, in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn"t mean things are culturally looking up; on the contrary, I"m afraid. Let's start with the City of Light, where millions of ...
“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds. As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and ...
After soul-shredding millennia of bloodshed and insane sectarian conflict, a small candle of hope finally flickers in the Middle East. That candle’s name is Binyamin Netanyahu, a man who may finally bring the world ...
I was gonna do a piece about Covid’s origin, as it’s been in the news again and readers have asked me to address it, but I’m putting it off for a week. Because the Pedro Gonzalez thing is stuck in my ...
In a recent New York Times book review, Henry Kissinger says that according to Dean Acheson, “leaving high office is like the end of a great love affair—a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensibilities and ...
I'm hoping liberals' instinct for taking the side of barbarism against civilization has taken a hit after seeing so many stories of the BLM movement bellowing their love for Palestinian terrorists paragliding into Israel to ...
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial comment uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The newspaper that only ...
I usually take it easy on myself for my Christmas and New Year’s pieces by penning less labor-intensive columns. In part because I love the season too much to get bogged down by weighty matters, and in part because I ...
The combination of Brexit and an imminent second Scottish independence referendum is profoundly depressing. Better to think of other things"food, for example. That offers comfort, even the possibility of jokes that ...
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and effectively ended the Cold War, there was tremendous relief and a sense of hope for the future. One writer even boldly declared that it marked “The End of History" and, as a ...
One hundred years ago, a down-in-the-dumps Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig, “The barbarians have taken over.” Later on Roth committed suicide, as did Zweig, both talented writers depressed about the state of the ...
At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very silly question, and we all had a laugh over it: “As Achilles told me in his tent the other evening, ...
In the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky provides the reader with a harsh, swift summary of prison life's brutalities. Penitence is painful, prolonged, and merciless, and the author"writing from his own ...
Has Mitt Romney given Israel a blank check for war? So it seemed from the declaration in Jerusalem by his adviser Dan Senor, who all but flashed Israel a green light for war, signaling the Israelis that, if you go, ...
Incredible as it may seem, the intellectual level of the Spanish political class has dropped as much as my alcoholic handicap. The latest mantra-braying of the spokesmen of power: Those who demonstrate against the ...
The Army was obsessed with cleanliness. We"d crane our necks around the bottoms of toilets and plumbing pipes until we could see our tired faces in them. We"d show off our pipes to the other lads and say ours were ...
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I am offended when people ask if I write under a pen name. The question seems to cast aspersions on a century of Mortimer family history—of which three generations have carried the same given name as I. Are we to ...
Gstaad—I had a whiff of it as it rolled in from the east, the smell of hypocrisy being different from others that penetrate our olfactory nerves in everyday life. It was coming from Davos and it had a Greco-Roman reek to ...
NEW YORK—What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned football breakaway Super League. Professional sports in Europe now follow the American way, which means money comes ...
On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law. Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language. Angry reactions, ...
