Ah, Italia! Such a great place to get your head around great art and great women, but such a shitty little country. How else to describe a so-called free and democratic country where the police cart off a national ...
Things aren’t looking too good these days, says Slavoj Zizek in his latest book, Living in the End Times. The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an ...
I began thinking about this column one week before I noticed that Craig Brown had pinched it. He had actually written what I meant to write one week before I decided to write it, which I guess cannot be called plagiarism ...
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible ... make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy. In 2016, the U.S. and Britain were both witness to peaceful revolutions. The British voted 52-48 to ...
I spotted a tiny faux pas, as they say in the land of cheese and garlic, and only mention it for the follow-up. I was watching a black-and-white movie made in 1948 starring Gale Storm, a beautiful young American actress in ...
We supposedly live in a secular and irreligious age. Man, however, is a religious creature prone to worship. This is never more apparent than when a figure from popular culture dies at a young age. Especially if their death ...
U.S. growth in the first quarter fell to 2.2 percent, a disappointment. But in Europe, that news would have caused general rejoicing. For consider the gathering crisis on the old continent. With negative growth now for ...
Is a conservative climate consensus possible? If hard cases make bad law, soft science makes sensible politics even harder. The Climate Wars present legislators on both sides of the aisle with few certainties, among them ...
One of the unintended consequences and, for me, an unanticipated pleasure of the Fox/Cablevision dispute and blackout has been once again listening to baseball on the radio rather than watching it on TV. Nothing, of ...
Ah Spring, the spring of our frost bitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits of Polish patriots who have fought and sacrificed for the West’s freedom. In this beautiful and heroic ...
Downton Abbey"s popularity in the United States comes as little shock to those who remember the early 1970s" Upstairs, Downstairs craze. In a word, the show's popularity is fueled by nostalgia. That word came to ...
Last week, Turkey decided to ban Twitter. The move was a reaction to supposed evidence that had spread on the website purporting to corroborate allegations of corruption within Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ...
American society has descended from one that whelped men who threw punches if a woman heard the lame profanity of a drunken lout, to one that whelps men who watch their women suffer rape and murder. How did we come to this ...
Dear Gato, It's late, and I"m half-watching Hobo With a Shotgun on the widescreen while I write. The feeling is, it's getting late. My working hours are 11PM-5AM. My waking hours are also late"noon and onwards. We, ...
The first criterion in choosing a vice president, it is said, is that he or she must be qualified to be president. Yet there is another yardstick by which candidates measure running mates. Do they bring something to the ...
At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes. Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor ...
“Like a fire bell in the night,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, “this momentous question ... awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” Jefferson was ...
Just as I finished complaining last week of the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realized they make up for it by being the worst-dressed people this side of the Ukraine. J.Crew has been in ...
None of this would have happened had I accepted my neighbor’s invite to dine with a Swiss billionaire banker, or bb. He’s an old friend, the bb, and untypically Swiss: He boozes, schnoofs, and chases women, or AFABs, as ...
Harvard man Russell Seitz has sent me an extraordinary present as an object lesson in “what a magazine should be, in case you start another one.” The paper has yellowed and is dog-eared, pages are falling out and the ...
Handsome men born before 1970 were no different than any other, average-looking, men. I mean, they were the captains of the football team and they felt the breasts of every cute girl in school and they eventually ran huge ...
In April, I noted that television ratings indicate that sports audiences skew Republican and entertainment audiences Democratic. "Which is more useful to control for propagandizing for your Party: the games or the ...
They are both Conservative politicians and both Etonians of the same vintage, yet they are almost permanently at odds. Would it not be better for the party to have coalition-government leader David Cameron and London Mayor ...
GSTAAD—Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black-and-white TV? Actually it was yours truly after watching the slobs parading up and down Gstaad’s main street. That was last year, but the bad news is ...
