Woke is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities must make one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J. O’Rourke, and in front of a packed congregation P.J. and I managed to not exactly be woke time and ...
NEW YORK—David Niven’s younger son Jamie, now an old man like yours truly and a bit overweight, approached my table and announced he had seen a video of me lunching elsewhere with two friends. He said this in front of two ladies I was with, one of whom has in the past raised issues, namely the wife. Luckily the video showed me with the designer Carolina Herrera and her husband, who are social friends, so after a pregnant ...
NEW YORK—On April 21, 1980, Rosie Ruiz won the fabled Boston Marathon in record time and looked fresh as a daisy when the media descended on her following her crowning with a wreath à la Ancient Greece. Rosie answered all the questions. She loved running, this was only her second marathon, and no, she was never tired or doubtful of victory during the two hours and 32 minutes of the race. The newspapers and the hacks went ...
Okay, sports fans, get your wallets out and start giving. That’s the latest brainstorm from a New York Times columnist who makes however unconvincing a case for reparations to black people. For slavery, that is. And that means you, whitey—or brownie, and I guess that goes for yellow ones also. He wants these reparations to be legislated into law, and everyone except African-Americans has to pay. His idea is hardly original. ...
Okay, chaps, keep your hands where people can see them, and don’t touch. And try not to look. Soon that too will be a crime, so keep your eyes on the ground and you’ll be fine. The other thing to stay away from is due process. It does not exist and don’t try to exploit it. It’s a male invention intended to shield men. Put this in your thick skull: You are presumed guilty when the accuser is female, especially an ...
I first met the man whose opioid products have supposedly killed 200,000 Americans 51 years ago, at the Hotel du Cap-d’Antibes. Mortimer Sackler looked old even back then, had a Noo Yawk accent, and without ever having been introduced approached me after a tennis match I had just lost with some unsolicited advice: “You need to calm down, take a tranquilizer,” or words to that effect. (I had been feuding throughout the ...
NEW YORK—This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Muslims, Druze, and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling WASPs are dead and buried, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs and irrelevance. The Jews are in like Flynn, ruling Wall Street, the real estate market, and the television networks. The ...
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 ...
