Last Wednesday, June 24, Pugs held a luncheon in honor of our first member to depart for the Elysian Fields, or that large CinemaScope screen up above, Sir Christopher Lee, age 93. Pugs club is now back to 19 members, the ...

Casino Jack is a consistently amusing biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the manic, bull-necked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who recently spent three and a half years in prison for, as far as I can tell, running a little ...

NEW YORK—Prince Pavlos, heir to the Greek throne, turned 55 recently, and I threw a small dinner for him. Pavlos is a hell of a prince, father, husband, and businessman. He’s tall, good-looking, a gent in every way, ...

NEW YORK—I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam bath, with lots of very ugly people walking around in stages of undress that would have once upon a ...

GSTAAD—Blah, blah, blah! I’ve heard it all before. We are all swivel-eyed fanatics, racists, and right-wing extremists. And we’re also bigots because we believe in Jesus Christ. Today is my name day, the Day of ...

We live in an era where fake news is real, and real news is fake. A recent furor in the U.K. concerned the involvement of Cambridge Analytica—President Trump’s favorite data jockeys—on the Leave side of the E.U. ...

Strange things are happening. In the stifled, constipated political discourse of the modern West, there are quite wide categories of facts that are rather obviously true, but which it has for decades been considered gross ...

With Egypt's melodramatic implosion, many Americans are asking, "€œWhat has this got to do with us?"€ The short answer: everything. We propped up Mubarak because he's good for Israel, yet most Egyptians want Israel ...

News reports about the hardships endured by the Venezuelan illegal immigrants sent by Gov. Ron DeSantis to Martha's Vineyard are hard to hear. One "migrant" told The New York Times that he felt "betrayed" because he didn't ...

The Week’s Most Defining, Refining, and Auld Lang Syne-ing Headlines BONNIE AND CLOD In 2019, while promoting her “black Bonnie and Clyde” movie Queen & Slim, Greek-Jewish-Jamaican filmmaker Melina Matsoukas ...

The final river of Yukio Mishima's life to swell from a stream into a rushing torrent was that of action, and it propelled him toward his fate. This was really, however, the river of ideology, which for Mishima was his own ...

Writing about an international crisis a couple of days before publication risks making you look like a fool—okay, a bigger fool than usual. Politicians, of course, suffer likewise. In the first days of the Norway campaign ...

(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.) The great tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano was once asked by a journalist: “Maestro, why do you smoke so many cigars?” To this impertinence Di Stefano responded with ...

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.” Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month—for we are not to speak of ...

NUEVA YORK–The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on ...

“Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking ... on most issues regarding foreign policy,” says GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham. Neocon William Kristol concurs: Hagel is “out on the fringes.” But ...

Bill Barr, two-time attorney general and one of approximately 2.5 members of the Trump administration to leave with his reputation intact, has also written one of only two books about that administration worth reading, "One ...

The third week of April, as always, sees two of the most significant red-letter days of the year—National McDonald’s Day, on 15 April, and the birthday of Adolf Hitler, on 20 April. As usual, I celebrated by heading ...

Thank God I don’t understand cryptocurrency, otherwise I should have lost all my money ages ago, and probably my house into the bargain. I do know one or two people who made a lot of money from Bitcoin in the early days, ...

Clearly something went horribly wrong with classical music in or shortly after 1945, something which left the old guard blissfully unaffected, yet which was almost bound to demoralize creators still in their youth. ...

A cease-fire in Syria brokered by the USA and Russia may hold for a bit, or it may have been thoroughly broken by the time you read this. Any optimism has to be tempered in the light of experience. The Middle East has been ...

If you have a heart in Africa it’s probably not a good idea to read Martin Meredith’s State of Africa because if you do, it will, in all likelihood, break it. In it, he covers, in gory detail, what has happened on the ...

Slapstick is, at best, only loosely defined as comedy. If an unsupervised toddler in hysterics can do something to evoke laughter, more effort should be expected of a grown man. Therefore, I have never cared for the spastic ...

Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of "severe punishment" if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Riyadh then ...