Of Drama and Drachmas
On the blue Aegean I float, reading: Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief. This is not in the latest newspaper, but in a new ...
On the blue Aegean I float, reading: Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief. This is not in the latest newspaper, but in a new ...
Why are there always rumors about male stars being gay? Maybe they’re true. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) claimed in his amusing 2006 book The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood, “With the exception of Russell ...
After getting screamed at by my liberal friends for doubting their doom and gloom predictions, one unavoidably oversized fact stuck in my slim, streamlined craw: People ARE getting fat. The average lifespan has been on a ...
Oh, what a warm womb of anonymity the Internet provides for the frustrated, the voiceless, the inadequate, the terminally unpleasant, the unpublished writers, and the grown men who live in their mothers’ basements on ...
Maybe it’s my age—or maybe life really is getting crazier—but even for California, it feels ever more to me that we have slipped down a rabbit hole. The latest evidence for this is the push to have the characters Bert ...
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 ...
Last week’s Republican debate at Ames, Iowa, and the straw poll Saturday did more than sort out the Republican field for 2012. They have given the nation a good close look at a Republican Party that no longer resembles ...
England’s cultural rainbow went up in flames last week, and as the smoke clears and the fog stubbornly returns, the experts are once again arguing over exactly how it all started. Few seem willing to discuss exactly how it ...
On September 1, 1957, a pretty French girl by the name of Patricia and an Italo-French couple, Feruccio and Ellen, joined me in the old harbor of Cannes waiting to board the super-new luxury liner Cristoforo Colombo. Our ...
ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—According to C. M. Bowra, gold had a divine association with the Ancient Greeks and possessed more than a symbolic value. When Pindar wished to stress something’s splendor, he called it golden, whether ...
Summer blockbuster movies often allow the popular imagination to engage metaphorically with topics that aren’t discussed honestly on the editorial page—topics such as IQ, race, and heredity. (Personally, I don’t think it ...
In 1653, the year Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, there appeared the first edition of what would become a classic—Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. A country then devastated by war turned gratefully to the ...
It’s said that no news is good news, but the problem is that there’s plenty of news, and all of it’s awful. I scanned my memory banks to try and remember the last time I heard a news story that pleased me or gave me hope ...
Let’s consider ourselves fortunate that Canada’s Somali settlers—the word “immigrant” is so 20th century—seem more or less content with killing each other. On the last day of July, the Edmonton Journal devoted not ...