I recently watched a Swedish movie, 1939, as good a film as I’ve seen in years, with a beautiful young blonde as the heroine, and with none of those boring Bergman silences that trademarked his movies. Alas, nowadays the moronic youth that watches movies prefers the visible to exceed reality, ergo endless science fiction and horror fantasies. It all has to do with the moneymen. As a Hollywood-based friend once described a ...

“She” strangles a cat, then dissects it and shreds what is left. “She” then hits a man with a bottle, strangles him, and finally drowns him. “She” calls herself Scarlet Blake, and the British papers and media feel obliged to refer to this muscular and terrifying individual as a woman. But this monster of a human is as male as there is, and only the female writer J.K. Rowling has the guts to point this out. J.K. has ...

The late ’60s and early ’70s were great years for yours truly. Sporting successes in tennis and karate, a great president in the White House, and some good reporting from Hue for National Review’s William Buckley had given me a career boost. That’s when Bill, a very good friend, decided Paris would be a safer place for an eager young Taki to make his name. There was another reason Bill picked the City of Light as my ...

Things ain’t looking that good. Nothing seems to be working in the so-called free world: rubbish in the streets, vandalism and violent crime, illegal immigration at record levels, no-go areas in towns and cities; is this why we pay taxes and call ourselves free? Mass shootings have become a way of life in America, illegal underage migrants are turning New York and Chicago into war zones, and Joe Biden is given a pass by an ...

I’m back scribbling about writing again because penmanship is like cocaine—once you start it’s difficult to stop. Disaffection is my customary response to contemporary writers and literature—long-winded me-me-me balderdash—and I won’t go near hysterical American female screeches who pass for writing from know-nothings at The New York Times. So, everyone I mention in this column is, alas, dead, but their writing ...

If it weren’t for Papa Hemingway’s machismo, or Scott Fitzgerald’s lovely prose, Somerset Maugham would have been my favorite writer. And one of the things I most regret is having refused an invitation for lunch at La Mauresque, the great man’s Cap Ferrat Riviera villa, a few years before his death. The invitation had come through an old “queen” by the name of Eric Nielsen, who had been making passes at the poor ...

I read somewhere that Saint Kitts and Nevis, thriving democracies somewhere south of Miami Beach, are demanding reparations from the Brits because the bad old English owned slaves back at the time when owning black people was rather chic. What surprised me is that I haven’t seen any claims from descendants of slaves against African owners—who thrived in the vile economy that slavery produced—nor against any Arab states ...

The massacre in Gaza has shoved the Ukraine war aside, which is just as well for Zelensky, who canceled the election he was about to lose and has outlawed rival political parties for the duration. I recently watched an interview the ex-comedian gave, and I must admit he comes through as a charming, honest, and warm person. Was I fooled by his act? Probably, but compared with his archenemy Putin’s thespian abilities, Volodymyr ...

The magical embroidery of memory is not involved in this one: I remember it as if it were yesterday, despite something like sixty years having gone by. I had had dinner at El Morocco, the best dinner-nightclub that has ever been, back when New York still spoke English. I had drunk Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1947 and had gone back to my parents’ apartment at the Sherry Netherlands and lay in bed drunk and dreamy. I had turned ...

Okay, sport fans, according to Joe Biden the Donald is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, so if you value your freedoms, do not vote for Trump or you’ll be seeing storm troopers marching down Fifth Avenue. Biden gets his ideas from The New York Times, the paper that prints only news that fits its extreme lefty agenda, and opinions whose virtue signaling is valued above truth or fact. I rarely read the Times, but when I do I ...

The word “democracy” comes from the Greek, but when the system was first used, it was a selective one, with men of means being the only ones eligible to vote. It has come a long way since, with American lefty busybodies trying to give the vote even to illegal migrants who have more or less snuck into the country. Personally I have always been a monarchist, although my type of monarchs—the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and ...

Happy 2024 to all you readers, although according to The New York Times it will be under a dictatorial regime if Trump becomes president again. So what is one to think or do? Americans have never tolerated autocratic government, despite Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to jail anyone opposed to Uncle Sam entering his war. Now the Times tells us that The Donald’s use of “dehumanizing language toward rivals” might be another ...

Living as we are under the collective inferiority of the West, and humbled as we are when faced with the cultural achievements of tribal Africans, primitive Amazonian tribesmen, Saudi Arabian witch doctors, and savages in general, I was relieved to see that Hollywood is hard at work in maintaining the myth that everything that the West has achieved since the Greeks was due to the white man’s cruelty and ability to steal from ...

My, my, how the years pass by. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve written a Christmas piece for Takimag, but the years have passed in an eye blink. Recently I asked myself, why do bad things happen to good people? (Well, not very good people, but well-intentioned.) This question has occupied thinkers throughout the ages. People who do not believe in a good God should logically have no problem with the existence of evil. In ...

I find it deliciously ironic and very satisfying. We suddenly have free speech at American universities, at least while Jewish billionaires are threatening to stop the moola. The presidents of top universities have cried uncle and have pledged that free speech will be for them what money was to Shylock. The only problem is that unlike Shylock, they are owed nothing and in fact are the ones who caused the problem in the first ...

I suppose it was the Almighty’s sense of humor to cover Western Europe with snow while those who flew into Dubai on private jets warned of planetary disasters due to fossil fuels. The United Nations climate conference is and always will be a contradiction, especially when held in a place whose wealth is uniquely derived from fossil fuel. COP28 is a joke, a lot of fat cats reading acronym-ridden speeches and with as much ...