The demise of The Weekly Standard was a pleasure, not because I like to see print magazines go down the drain—to the contrary—but because of its parentage, William Kristol and John Podhoretz. These two unpleasant neocons are known as the “Poisoned Dwarf” and “Four Pizzas,” respectively, and rarely have I seen two bigger con men get away with more stuff than this pair. They are smarmy, loquacious, and incompetent ...

Let’s begin 2019 with some truths and a few admissions: We humans have been evolving for some time now, but not really. Only a few decades ago we were certain that the oldest human fossil was a small-brained female by the name of Lucy. Lucy was known as Australopithecus afarensis, and she had existed from about 3.85 million years ago to about 2.95 million years ago. Human evolution, it is believed, took a direct path from ...

Sometime during the 1920s, at an exclusive party at Count Boni de Castelanne’s, a great French lady felt herself beginning to die at the dinner table. “Quick, bring the dessert,” she whispered to the waiter. She was not overcome by greed. She simply wished to hurry dinner along so as not to drop dead before the party rose from the table. In other words, she did not wish to cause discomfort to those present. Needless to ...

Here we are, once again writing for Takimag’s Christmas issue. Like every birthday of our Lord Jesus, this is a special one, so I want to make it count. In my sporting days, trying too hard was as counterproductive as not trying hard enough, so let’s see if this principle also applies to the written word. Eighty-five thousand Yemeni children may have died of hunger, while 10,000 men, women, and children have been killed ...

Father Munkelt is a New York City-based priest who is as intelligent and well-read as anyone I’ve known, and he wrote most of this essay for Takimag under my byline. (Journalists are expert cheaters and plagiarizers, but when it comes to a man of God, I cannot speak with forked tongue.) I asked the good father why the Catholic Church is in such turmoil and about the sex scandal. Since the end of the classical pagan world, the ...

NEW YORK—At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The reality is an urban agglomeration of millions, most of them with a disinclination to speak English, and then there’s the celluloid city of 42nd Street, Annie Hall, Dead End, Rear Window, and King Kong. This is the dream city I keep writing about, the one that stabs you in the gut because it’s gone, and it gets worse when you accept ...

They will finally have their way: In the year 2044, only a short 26 years from now, white Americans will become a minority—hooray, yippee, viva The New York Times and all the left-wing scum who write for it. So says the Census Bureau, whose graphics show a demographic change that has white Americans becoming a minority. Although some people think that the United States is a nation preoccupied by race, this is normal for a ...

What I should have done is gone out and bought a lottery ticket. I’ll explain: The snow suddenly came down in buckets, icing the city and bringing gridlock like I’ve never seen before. The traffic cops in the Bagel are all Hispanics, to a man and to a woman around four feet tall, and all weigh over 250 pounds. The moment the white stuff started coming down they left their posts and headed for their casas. Bagelites went ...

NEW YORK—A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of Nov. 9, 2018, becoming my third grandchild. Through modern technology I was flooded with pictures of a blond-fuzzed and pink little baby boy less than a day old. Flying in from Gstaad, the mother of my children did not make it on time, which was just as well. Like most women, she tends to overreact where babies are ...

A fifth columnist is a supporter or secret sympathizer of an enemy nation, and the phrase was coined by Spanish nationalist general Emilio Mola Vidal. Before World War II broke out in 1939, Europe was awash with charges of “the fifth column at work” being bandied about by both appeasers as well as those who wanted to stand up to Hitler. One thing was for sure: Jewish groups were adamant that appeasing Germany was the work ...

NEW YORK—An old-fashioned party is a gathering of friends invited by the host or hostess, who foots the bill. Old-fashioned parties are very rare in New York nowadays; actually, they are nonexistent, having been replaced by the charity shindig, where the guests pay, the host or hostess profits, the gossip columns get to write about it, and the charity sometimes even gets to see some of the moola the climbers paid to get ...

NEW YORK— I now know it by heart. Brooklyn Heights, that is. It takes 35 minutes by cab from where I live on the Upper East Side, and approximately $30. I even walked to the Heights once: one hour down the FDR, turn left onto the Brooklyn Bridge, dodge the aggressive bikers and avoid the vendors. It’s a twenty-minute crossing give or take ten minutes, depending on the crowds. After getting off and turning right, one’s ...

NEW YORK—In the dark she still looks good. The mystery and magnetism linger until dawn, and then you slowly see the lines and the harshness. Like a lady of the night who has smoked 10,000 cigarettes, the coming of the light is the enemy. New York ain’t what she used to be, that’s for sure. She’s a tired old place, with the upper-class vertical living gone to seed, and the honky-tonk fun side of the city gentrified and ...

There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought police, and hard-eyed women roaming the television studios with lists of sexual predators. There is also dread over the latest exports from the city’s youth detention centers, thanks to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy and ex-wife of Governor Cuomo, known to hit the bottle and the pills occasionally, and now busy bailing ...

Is Mohammad bin Salman a murderer? Is it fair to say he is a hairy coward who has starved millions of children in Yemen? Did his crawling parasites dismember Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last week? Is this man a perverted sadist? If so, this is the real scandal. I doubt much will come of this murder most foul. Jared Kushner, The Donald’s son-in-law, could well see to it. Kushner probably smelled money to be made from the ...

The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding-dong, ding-dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. From my window I look at them and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells, day and night, and their sounds accompany me while I hit the makiwara. I like it best when they cozy up and examine me from up close, with absolutely no reaction. No emotion, no curiosity, serene-like. The one ...