GOP War of All Against All?

There still exists a possibility that, come Jan. 20, 2013, we could have a Republican Senate and House, and a Republican president. But there is also a possibility that a Goldwater-Rockefeller-type family bloodletting could ...

The Right’s Derek Chauvinism

Quick quiz: Who was Jerry Parr? Don’t Google it, that’s cheating! Without looking it up, do you know who he was? Odds are, you don’t. Jerry Parr was the Secret Service agent in charge of protecting Ronald Reagan on ...

Rep. Paul Ryan

Simplify, Simplify

Stopped in at my local office-supplies megastore for some printer ink cartridges. Total expenditure: $47.78. Total length of printed receipt: 341/2 inches"€”nearly a yard. Most of that yard was a Rebate Redemption Form. ...

Jimmy Connors

Racquet Royalty

Next year it will be half a century since tennis went open, with the distinction between amateurs and professionals abolished. Previously it was a sport either for the very young or for the rich; now it's one that makes the ...

The View From the Taverna

Nestled under the Acropolis, snug and safe among the ancient ruins of a long-ago grandeur, Plaka remains the only protected area of Athens, with greedy developers as welcome as a certain Minnesota dentist at an Aspinall ...

Warren Buffett

My Beef With Buffett

NEW YORK—Here is the $64-million question: Is there a moral case against soaking the rich? I can’t think of a better place to ponder such an issue than right here in the womb of capitalism, the Big Bagel, taking into ...

Steve Bannon on Line One

I never made it to Zurich but met up with Steve Bannon through the miracle of technology, thanks to my hosts at Weltwoche, the Swiss weekly. They gave him my telephone number and he rang at a civilized time and we had a ...

Chemical Imbalances

A senior Syrian government spokesman has confirmed that his nation possesses chemical weapons and might employ them against a "€œforeign aggressor."€ Bashar al-Assad's embattled regime just managed to shoot itself in ...

Acropolis, Athens

The Week That Perished

The Week’s Most Flaying, Braying, and MLK-ing Headlines NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH JEW-CONTRITION New Mexico consistently scores worst-of-the-worst in terms of poverty and educational rankings by state. And many of the ...

Humor Me

My theory concerning the nature and provenance of laughter is both recently conceived and not at all dogmatic. It is also scientifically uninformed. It may even be wholly incorrect. Feel free to disagree with it at any ...

Every Mountain Holds a Million Myths

GSTAAD—Mountains in summer have a faraway astral beauty, snowy and shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks in such mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about Tibet’s Mount Kailas, where locals offered ...

Game, Set, Memories

Write about things you really know, was the advice Papa Hemingway offered wannabe writers, so here goes: The French Open is still on, Wimbledon is coming up, and I’ve just read a lament by some Frenchwoman about how ...

Barack Obama

Slowly We Turn

Obama is pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Or at least he says he is. He also said that American forces in Iraq are no longer there. Officially, the Iraq war is over, at least if you ignore the fighting. So where ...

Bush’s Finest 30 Seconds: The Willie Horton Ad

The press in America is even worse than we imagine. We sense that they're biased and stunningly incompetent. They are those things, but so much more. Our media's version of the news is mathematically and precisely the ...

Tourist Tramps

There is an ugly pox plaguing the travel industry, and it is not COVID-19. For over a year, up to 90 percent of the “calls for submission” on travel sites like Matador solicited writers from the “LGBT Community,” ...

“Screw the Jews” Might Bring Bad News

Last week we talked about overcorrection. This week, let’s see how the right’s gonna use that shotgun to blow off its remaining toes. As I pointed out last year, the GOP goes into 2024 with several strikes against it, ...

The Unraveling of Obama’s Foreign Policy

Three days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was assassinated, Jay Carney told the White House press corps it had been the work of a flash mob inflamed by an insulting video about the Prophet Muhammad. As the killers had ...

Martha's Vineyard

Nightmare on Martha’s Vineyard

Based on MSNBC's recent special, "Martha's Vineyard v. DeSantis," even award-winning documentarians cannot produce a propaganda film about Gov. Ron DeSantis' "political stunt" of sending illegals to this wealthy liberal ...

Letters From a Screenwriter in Trouble

Dear Gato, I didn’t tell you what happened to Mickey after he was finally evicted from the movie trailer because I didn’t know. I tried calling him for a while; no answer. So I lost track of Mickey until one ...

Kanye West

Behold Their Lofty Angst: Artists in the Trump Era—Part Two

“Can Protest Art Get Its Mojo Back?” asks Spencer Kornhaber in a July 2018 article in The Atlantic. For though it’s a shocking thing, given the characteristic courage and heroism of progressives, “[s]ince the 2016 ...

Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats

"If you look at Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people want politicians that do what they promise," said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreno. The Spaniard was explaining to The New York ...

The Festering Falklands Fiasco

The thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War is rolling around, and Argentina’s leadership is starting to sound the battle cry again. Buenos Aires is already pushing for sea and air embargos of the Falklands. A ...

Banksy

Royal Pains

After four days of royalist reverie, the imported Union Jacks are starting to sag"€”drooping disconsolately as the proud people who "€œnever ever shall be slaves"€ shake their heads free of the spell. There will not ...


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