NEW YORK CITY—Goodbye, snowcapped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings, choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, back to the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended. This is the bad news, the good being that ...
As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants while he was about to be executed by the Mexicans, “Who knew?” Last week the owner of the Palace hotel in Gstaad rang me and asked me to join him for a drink with Akira Kitade, a well-known Japanese author, best known for Visas of Life and the Epic Journey, concerning the Jewish Sugihara survivors reaching Japan and safety. Like most of his countrymen and -women, ...
As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer’s daughter. Not so fast, as they say. I live among farmers and haystacks up here in the Alps, and I’ve yet to run into a farmer’s daughter who is worth the buckshot in the bottom. I was thinking of such matters all last week while skiing with my son and his two children, and how happy I feel now, ...
A rare British species, a womanizing ex–foreign minister, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last week, and it brought back memories of a similar tryst by yours truly. Boris Johnson reclined on a bed of straw with a purring cheetah and lived to write about it without injury, although I am certain there were plenty of Brussels sprouts hoping for a different ending to the affair. Never mind. ...
Hold the presses! More Germans trust Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Trump’s United States. This is earth-shattering news, a scoop like no other. If this were 1969 the moon landing would be a smaller headline. And guess who came up with the scoop: none other than The New York Times, the paper that first told us that there was no famine in the Soviet Union back in the 1930s. (Five million Ukrainians died, but the writer of the ...
The troubles with the modern world are too numerous to list, technology being among the worst offenders. Just imagine how much better off we’d be if there were no plastic bags to pollute our oceans and rivers, no soulless supermarkets but proper butcher shops, no imported European foods but homegrown lettuce from local farmers, and so on. Just imagine how much smarter we’d all be if television had never been invented. ...
This is party time in Gstaad. From the richest billionaires down to some impoverished souls with only a few million to their name, “the joint is jumpin’.” Last week one tycoon converted his mega-chalet into a nightclub and the music bombed away all night. Everyone who attended turned into Beethoven after one hour, which in a way improved the situation. People talk such rubbish nowadays, it was a relief to point at one’s ...
Who was it who said we always hurt those we love the most? I did just that last week, skiing out of control, making a sharp left turn, and crashing into my wife, Alexandra—a beautiful and terrific skier—who was standing still under a mogul. As I knocked her down, my skis ran over her face, crushing her nose and cutting two deep gashes on her forehead. I then rolled down the mountain unable to stop because of these ghastly ...
Here in Gstaad there is no worker alienation. Nor are the rich especially worried. The talk is about snow conditions, upcoming parties, the price of real estate, Brexit, and, of course, socialism, a disease that strikes those far away from this alpine resort, but has yet to infect any of the locals. I had a long chat with a friend of mine, born and bred up here, who makes his living teaching people how to ski and fixing their ...
“The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.” This is a direct quote from last week’s New York Times, a newspaper that is known for being anti–heterosexual white male, anti-Christian, and now anti–British ruling class. Mind you, normally when someone attacks the British I smile, and more often than not I mumble that no one hits the Brits ...
Everyone’s rather angry nowadays. Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, people with special needs, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re angry. The Donald seems to have finally united the United States. Everybody hates Trump and, of course, men. Toxic masculinity has replaced the evil Nazis and their goose step, and Trump the ...
Asked how he was feeling as he was about to give a speech to a ladies’ group, Mark Twain looked horror-stricken and said: “How do you expect me to feel? Shakespeare is dead, Goethe is dead, and I have a terrible cold.” Alas, I’m no Twain, but I feel worse than the Mississippi sage ever did, that I’m sure of. Having gone cross-country skiing underdressed in bone-chilling temperatures didn’t help. I now sneeze about ...
It is normal in the hyperbolic times we’re living in to call people iconic or legendary. Both “hyperbole” and “iconic” are Greek words, and they were coined in order to separate the normal from the legendary. The trouble is that today the word “legendary” is overused. Untalented performers, bandy-legged footballers, even silver-tongued crooked politicians are referred to as legends by flacks and PR enablers. ...
Do any of you know what a cisgender is? I just found out. A cisgender is a term describing someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my Spectator colleague Jeremy when I read about his conversations with normal people while living inside a French cave. I can no longer converse with anyone ...
Funny thing is, I was in school with a man named Ted Widmer, and I recently read that one Ted Widmer is a “distinguished lecturer” at a New York university and is senior fellow at the “Council for Ethics” in international affairs. The Ted I knew was anything but ethical, and dressed rather strangely, if you know what I mean. Never mind—whether he was a schoolmate or not, Widmer has written a treatise about 1919 and ...
GSTAAD—My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended up asking men and women to please leave my bedroom, especially my bathroom. I had some very pretty young things drop in and some even overstayed, and—surprise, surprise—there were even some items missing after the cleanup the next day. But that was then. I’m now in Gstaad for the duration. The good news for ...
