GSTAAD—This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in, skiing, cross-country, kickboxing, even some nature walking along a stream. (I did my last downhill run with Geoffrey Moore, one that ended in a collision with a child at the bottom of the mountain, and I’m thinking of calling it quits in downhill skiing for good.) The trouble with athletes is that early on we enact the destiny to which we are all ...

Like a strange melody that keeps repeating in my ear are four letters, PTSD, an acronym for a psychiatric disorder that seems to afflict most criminals in America. I suppose some shrink invented it, then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up; finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since article 1 section 9 of the Constitution, Habeas Corpus. We are in the midst of ...

ST. MORITZ—Once upon a time, not that long ago, St. Moritz was the world’s greatest resort, an exclusive winter wonderland for royalty, aristocrats, and shipping tycoons. I’d say the place reached its peak during the ’40s until the late ’60s, and like the rest of the great old resorts around the world, it’s been downhill ever since. The reason for this is obvious: The newly rich barbarians outnumber the old guard, ...

Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it was Santayana, and boy, did he ever get it right. My friend Christopher Mills has given me a terrific book, The Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze, about the breaking of the Nazi economy. I thought I knew everything there is to know about that period, but I hadn’t thought of global economic realities, the ones that ...

GSTAAD—I cross-country ski the old-fashioned way, not skating but on machine-made narrow tracks. It is known to be the best exercise in the world, both upper and lower body getting the maximum workout as one churns along a beautiful course in Lauenen, a tiny nearby village that looks like Gstaad did sixty years ago. I used to bring my children to the lake here during the summer, warning them time and again about a horrible ...

GSTAAD—Okay, sports fans, have you been enjoying the concentration-camp Olympics? I’m sure the Uighurs in the Chinese gulag are riveted, especially watching the downhill, the trouble being most of the one million Muslim prisoners have been issued Equatorial Guinea-made TV sets, apparatuses that only film crocodiles swallowing humans. Joe Biden, in the meantime, has steered clear of the Games and has sent a message via ...

GSTAAD—Joan Didion, who died December last, took herself extremely seriously. American writers tend to do that, especially those whose books are unreadable, the kind that win prizes and get reviewed by the Bagel Times. Pretension aside, however, Didion was a hell of a writer, a stylist who modeled her patterns on Papa Hemingway’s instructions. We never met, but I knew enough to stay away because of a joke I played on ...

During the late ’50s I was on the European tennis circuit and was ranked among the lowest. I was No. 3 in Greece but back then Greece was hardly a tennis power, unlike today (No. 4 among men and 6 among women). In 1957 the American Althea Gibson won Wimbledon and became the first black player to win a major. She and I were friends and used to hit together. During the Rome tournament another friend, the great Italian Nicola ...

GSTAAD—Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: Did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with discussing privilege is it turns in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question. There were no straightforward answers. Let’s face it: ...

GSTAAD—According to a little bird Boris has gone from brilliant to bawd, and according to me this village has gone from unlivable to perfect in one easy week. The slopes are empty, the snow is excellent, the restaurants now take reservations, and the slobs are visible but not dominant in town. If April is the cruelest month according to T.S. Eliot, January is the nicest month according to yours truly. The liver has a break, ...

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 that this year Slobbovia has come to stay. Mind you, Alexandra and I had planned to have fifty friends for a party to celebrate the fifty years of my enslavement, but Mister Omicron arrived and put a damper on ...

A revisionist-historian-anthropologist-anarchist, whose name is not important because his works are based on personal assumptions and prejudices, insists in a book he co-wrote before his recent death that agriculture was to blame for the sorry state humanity finds itself in at present. According to the departed, hunter-gatherers lived happily in bands, then agriculture was invented, and that led to surpluses, population growth, ...

GSTAAD—It is hard to imagine we have reached the year 2022 and still impose completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. By “we” I mean those of us in the supposedly enlightened West, where silliness, jealousy, cruelty, and wokeness rule the roost. I’ll begin with the Chinese virus that has contrived to dominate the headlines even more than Boris Johnson and Meghan Markle put together. I got Covid following my ...

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman, and never recovered his faculties again. It was the autumn of 1888. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and he lived for a decade longer, empty-eyed, silent, and entirely unaware of the fame that was about to engulf him. Was his tragic ...

Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper of its most populous city launches a totally mendacious project reinterpreting its past. The practice was perfected during the old communist system that ruled Romania, Hungary, Poland, and the rest of the Soviet satellites. But it is no longer possible now that the old continent has rediscovered freedom. The place where such a big lie is taking place is right here in New ...

NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are now a thing of the past, at least here in the Bagel, so it’s home sweet home for the poor little Greek boy, for dinner, drinks, and even some dancing at times. Here in my Bagel house my proudest possessions are my three Oswald Birley pictures. One is enormous and covers the whole wall of the entrance hall. The ...