The death of Eve Curie Labouisse at age 102 brought back memories. She was Marie Curie’s daughter and the only one of her immediate family not to win a Nobel Prize. Her parents, Pierre and Marie Curie, won the Nobel in 1903 in the physics field, and then her mother won it on her own for chemistry in 1911. Her sister, Irene, won the Nobel in 1935, again for chemistry. Quite a family. I met Madame Labouisse in Athens during ...

I’m not a ballet fan, although I admire like hell the pain these poor guys and gals have to go though to reach the top. Pop stars have it easy. All they have to do is write some very bad lyrics or make some horrible noise and presto, they get laid a lot and make millions upon millions. Their success makes inherited wealth moral by ...

As everyone who has ever visited Belgium knows, the place is crawling with pedophiles, most of them in government and in service to the European Union. Scandal after scandal has been hushed up because it involved higher-ups, of the same social stratum as the higher-ups who now are accusing the Poles of "immoral behavior." What did the bravest and most foolhardy people in Europe do to deserve such opprobrium? They ...

As everyone who has read Goethe or Schiller knows, Schadenfreude is the tendency to maliciously enjoy others’ misfortunes. Although I hate to say so myself, my one virtue is that I do not indulge in this brilliantly named past-time, which so many of my fellow scribes seem to practice. Hence I will not dwell on John (four pizzas) Podhoretz’s resignation from the New York Post in order to run the Likud Party’s ...

OK sports fans. This is it. Everyone one of you can now be president.  All you have to do is kick a bearded Palestinian towelhead out of Lincoln Center and you’re in. Rudy Giuliani brags that he’s a more decisive leader than anyone else running for the top job because he kicked Yassir Arafat out of a United Nations- sponsored concert. “I didn’t hesitate,” says the warrior,  “I made ...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is as gruesome a fellow as they come. Mind you, he’s not as bad as Governor Eliot Spitzer, but then not every public official is a habitual body ...

There is no one better than Orwell, especially in his masterwork, 1984. He saw our future well in advance. It appears that once-great Britain will soon start jailing people for making “homophobic” comments. This proposal confirms my suspicion that the whole art of politics today consists of pandering to the weakness, fears, and greed of the people. And, of course, to the perennial human urge to control one another’s ...

O to be in England! Last week it was Muslim staff at Sainbury’s refusing to sell alcohol because it offended their religious sensibilities.  (Sainsbury’s is the largest super market in that dreary old island). Now we learn that some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually-transmitted diseases. A small number even declines to treat patients ...

The Giuliani campaign reminds me of the Japanese Empire towards the middle of 1945: One disaster after another.  Let’s see. The Tokyo fire bombing took out 150,000 civilians and burnt most of the city; then came the loss of Okinawa, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—and to top all that off the Soviet Union declared war on the emperor. It might be stretching it a bit, but just look at Rudy’s situation. He has Norman Podhoretz, a ...

If Faustus was willing to sell his soul to the Devil for sex, wealth and power, Eliot Spitzer, governor of New York, has settled for power— sensing full well that the other two follow naturally. Mind you, money doesn’t enter into it.  His father is a real estate shark billionaire who, in order to develop homes, has put out more orphans and widows than I’ve had hot meals or drunken nights.  As far as sex ...

Libel laws are supposedly not as strict as they used to be, but don’t you believe it. For example, and I will not mention politically incorrect things one was permitted to write in jest back then. When Liberace died of AIDS, I wrote “Ashes to ashes, dust to ...

Having been a sportsman throughout my youth, I learned early on never to second guess athletes. One day you can’t miss a backhand even if you try, as they say—and the next you’re flailing like a dowager. Fans don’t ever get it. Nor do sportwriters. If A-Rod is having a hell of a year, it means that he will have a hell of a playoff. If only it were that simple. I just watched the Yankees lose the fourth and ...

It is now close to fifty years that karate—the art of empty hand fighting—has been popular in the West. Karate’s aim is to develop a synergism of the will, the nerves and the muscles which manifests itself in the maximum controlled release of energy, speed and strength.  Good karate means command of the mind as well as the body. Although there are countless styles and thousands of so called grand masters, ...

Once, walking down my street towards the park, we came face to face and I refused to give way and bumped into him. He protested. "In the past, people like you would get off the sidewalk for people like me under the penalty of death..." said I, evoking a Samurai custom. He was appalled but there was nothing he could do, as he had stepped out without his ...

Robert D. Novak may have thought of him as a fraud, as did Jackie Onassis, who was an expert—after all, she did look at the mirror daily—but in my mind he was the real deal and a very good president to boot. Richard Nixon came to mind when reading about the pain certain Brooklynites are still going through fifty years after the Dodgers left town for the wide open spaces of Los Angeles. Here’s Rabbi Kushner ...

The Waverly Inn on Bank Street, here in the Big Apple, is the hottest ticket in town. Owned by Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair honcho, it became the chicest place for dinner even before it opened. (Graydon opened it unofficially for friends of his). It is located on a quiet Greenwich Village street which would do justice to an Edward Hopper painting, and the interior resembles the way small inns used to look like before Planet ...