NEW YORK—The fact that a sailor on leave cannot whistle at a pretty girl’s legs is scientific proof that America is beyond help and finished for good. That also goes for hard hats, who along with sailors were among the whistlers back in the good old days before woke ruined men, women, and the country in general. Already radical activists have destroyed the notion of womanhood as well as that of biology by using words such ...

Just as I finished complaining last week of the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realized they make up for it by being the worst-dressed people this side of the Ukraine. J.Crew has been in the news lately because the company has yet again changed hands, with hacks waxing nostalgically about preppy style and all that ’60s stuff. All I can say is, how can they tell? Hacks wouldn’t know what ...

NEW YORK—Is it poor little ol’ me imagining things, or are Americans becoming stupider by the minute? I’ve been traveling and running into the species, and I swear that the most intelligent thing I’ve heard recently from a New Yorker is “Like, you know, like, uh, you know, uh, like, uh...” This moron was talking in a loud voice and did not give the impression of having been hit rather hard over the head with a ...

Never paraphrasing the classics was a given until woke sensibilities became a must. It was brought to mind by the BBC’s adaptation of Great Expectations, with the convict Magwitch knocking the Empire, and Miss Havisham taking opium on the side. What they should have done is have Pip hustling coke for a fellow Magwitch convict named Escobarian, bringing it daily to the addicted old lady, and Estella sniffing—no pun ...

GSTAAD—As everyone knows, the balder, shorter, and more repellent the seducer, the more lavish the lunch he produces for the dumb blonde. Lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today’s functional world. In today’s rare civilized lunch, there are only two purposes: the seduction of a lady or the exchange of serious ideas. The latter was achieved last week in an outdoor lunch ...

GSTAAD—Tom Sizemore, the American character actor who recently died broke and homeless at 61, was a hell of a thespian. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and Heat, he played tough soldiers and gangsters whose actions obscured a soft heart. Acting is not mugging à la Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. It’s what Sizemore conveyed subliminally. I never met him, but he once rang me from L.A. with a ...

GSTAAD—The man in the white suit is not exactly a matinee idol around these parts. The mauvaises langues have it that the rich fear him more than the poor because they have more to lose. I’m not so sure, although it does make sense. It did not in the past: Spartan kings were on the first line of battle, unflinchingly eager to show their troops how to die. Samurais worshipped a heroic death, shunned opulence, but were ...

GSTAAD—Okay, sports fans, it’s time to spill the beans. Sometime last year I wrote about rich man’s kickboxing, the art of punching and kicking at someone holding up pads, the best conditioner I know if done correctly and nonstop. I also call it the most Christian of sports because there’s a lot of outgoing and receiving nothing in return. It goes something like this: left jab, right cross, then left jab and right cross ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a property in the Swiss Alps is in no need of a house in New York City. With apologies to old Jane, I am seriously contemplating giving up living in the Big Bagel after close to seventy years. It’s elementary, dear readers, the place simply ain’t what it used to be; in fact it’s the lack of glamour and chic, the utter coarseness of everyday life, and the ...

GSTAAD—They’re whispering that it was the biggest haul since the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Others say that compared with the Graff swag of last week, the Great Train Robbery was a mere bagatelle. Nobody knows nuthin’, and while the fuzz remains schtum, the on-dit is that it was the greatest robbery since the Louisiana Purchase, the trouble being those who say such things think the Louisiana Purchase is a ...

Attendees listened intently and cheered her to the rafters. She got a cool million for an hour-long speech, which is more than Boris or Blair could ever hope for. And it wasn’t even her specialty—she’s an ecdysiast—but during the recent Hedge Fund Week in Miami, Kim Kardashian was the star speaker. It tells me all I want to know about hedge fund managers, as I had a good teacher long ago, one John Bryan of toe-sucking ...

GSTAAD—As everyone knows, snobbery is nothing but bad manners passing itself off as good taste. Past American society dames were terrible snobs, until they met their French and British counterparts who put them in their place. I’m not going to mention any names because most of them are dead, but looking around me up here in the Alps I’ve seen some new horrors, money snobs who make the older type look like nuns. Mind you, ...

GSTAAD—There is nothing much I can add to what Daniel Johnson and Charles Moore wrote about the great Paul Johnson, except that I shall miss his annual summer visits to Gstaad, where we walked for hours on mountain trails and I had the opportunity to take in some of his best bons mots. He knew everything and could tell a story like no one. The times Lady Carla was with us—she is Italian and never draws a breath—Paul would ...

Norman Mailer was born on January 31, 1923, and as his hundredth birthday approaches there is a major revival of interest among those who can still read. Norman died in 2007, aged 84, and his first-born son, Michael, a talented film director who has since become my closest friend, came over to my house that day in a slight state of shock. I was his father’s friend and admirer, so we sat down and drank the day and night away. ...

Shot in the once upon a time city of dreams, now of nightmares, the sweeping solipsism expressed made paranoia a kind of totalizing faith. Behind the nauseating self-promotion a so-called prince and his Hollywood moll hogged the headlines. Far, far east from there lay a dead man, one who had absolutely nothing in common with the self-absorbed, egoistic, and narcissistic Englishman; to the contrary, King Constantine II went to ...

GSTAAD—Living my life in person is not a redundancy of expression, but it actually means living without social media. Why have I chosen the unplugged life? That’s an easy one to answer, but first a little history: I think I was the last one to switch to writing on a word processor when I founded the precursor of Takimag as an insert in a New York weekly called Taki’s Top Drawer. The Bagel weekly was the N.Y. Press, and it ...