It felt like a stiletto jab in my liver, a pain so sharp it will take half a century to forget. Jessica Raine—AKA Nurse Jenny in Call the Midwife—has shacked up with a married man, an actor and a redhead to boot. It is ...
John Hope Franklin, the famed black historian at Duke University, once told the incoming freshmen, “The new America in the 21st century will be primarily non-white, a place George Washington would not ...
This week’s state visit by Hu Jintao, China’s “president”"I prefer to say “head apparatchik,” since “president” implies an elected position"has fired off another round ...
Yesterday our beneficent and merciful overlords at the US Department of Health and Human Services unveiled to the public a series of grisly images they’ll be forcing the tobacco industry to slap on cigarette packs in ...
Curious little article here in The New York Times: “Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look.” The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and ...
My taste in films is strange, at least in the statistical sense. I don’t like romance, I don’t like happy endings (they depress me), and I don’t like gratuitous or unrealistic violence. I like films that are serious, ...
Christian rock is just like any other music that sucks, except it’s played for Jesus. The other night I peeked into our local arena and found it filled to max capacity for the "Winter Jam 2012 Tour ...
When questioning modern myths, one feels like Don Quixote charging the windmills. Nonetheless it’s time to demythologize the British National Health Service, which evidently serves as a model for some of President ...
The Week’s Most Gleaning, Preening, and Overweening Headlines THE PRINCES OF DARKNESS Spin Doctors reimagined: One, two, princes kneel before you That’s what I said, now Princes, princes who adore you Just go ahead, ...
Ghosts were the first thing I remember frightening me as a child. Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Ghosts are at least as real as dreams." This is the most intelligent statement ever given on the subject, and though I ...
You think the 2012 Republican field is lackluster? Check out these party animals. The “party” in that last sentence is the Chinese Communist Party. The gents standing in the picture are the aptly named Standing ...
Day after day, Italian newspapers pullulate with deeply disturbing examples of the antics of Italy's judges. But this past week has been a vintage one even by Italian standards. First, a judge in the city of L"Aquila, ...
Who is worse—the pusher or the addict? I’d say it’s fifty-fifty as they sustain each other, although the addict has the moral high ground. Greece is the addict. The German and French banks are the pushers, with ...
Chester A. Arthur was known to have 80 pairs of pants in his closet at the White House and changed several times a day. His nicknames, “Elegant Arthur” and “The Gentleman Boss” were earned from his ...
It is now clear that Trump isn't waiting for a better moment. This was not an anomaly. It's not an accident. After he signed his third spending bill with no wall funding, which he claims to need, all sentient beings ...
When the modern-day eminences grises in grey suits from St. James’s gave the nod of approval to William and Kate’s marriage, only the most hardened cynics were heard groaning in Old England’s republican ...
This week’s dramatic events—Trump surviving being wounded by a would-be assassin quickly followed by his selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate—will focus attention on the newer generation of ...
I’ve been writing about the perverse side effects of affirmative action for a third of a century, and one of my favorite examples has always been the recurrent attempts to lure more blacks into becoming ...
Sigmund Freud’s notion of a death instinct always seemed preposterous to me, but now I am not so sure. At any rate, there seems to exist a death wish, and in the Western world it has become almost a matter of mass ...
I do not have many friends who are 97, but tennis legend Gardnar Mulloy is one of them. It is not clear why I should be so lucky to know him, nor why I should have had the opportunity to square off against him on the tennis ...
Television—thanks to the profit motive—is intensely imitative. If any type of show is successful, a horde will suddenly appear of usually lesser and shorter-lived knockoffs. In one season, the networks may be ...
“Government is theft.” The old libertarian battle cry came to mind when the news hit, two weeks ago, that Cyprus was about to confiscate 7 percent of all the insured deposits in the island’s two biggest ...
Dear Gato, This time last week I fell asleep and woke up in an MRI machine asking myself, "Where am I? And how did I get here?" I was lying inside the industrial-size white doughnut that is an MRI scanner, the ...
Never has the contrast between the scale of world events and my own little personal concerns been so great. While millions flee bombardment, and the world economy faces implosion, with all the hardship that ...
