In 1653, the year Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, there appeared the first edition of what would become a classic—Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. A country then ...

Dear old England. What a wonderful country we live in. Change and decay in all around I see. Europe is in a state of near-collapse. Chaos and rioting have run rife throughout the ...

It’s said that no news is good news, but the problem is that there’s plenty of news, and all of it’s awful. I scanned my memory banks to try and remember the last time I ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was ragging on conservatives and wanted to include how Tea Partiers pretend to be all about spending cuts but won’t touch the two biggies, Social ...

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—The smell of pine wafting from the shore and the sight of sun-bleached terracotta houses shimmering in the midday heat remind me of the simple island life ...

LOS ANGELES—When you say, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just jump on the subway” to someone in El Lay, you get one of the following responses: “Excuse me, would you ...

Perhaps no movie this year generates more concussive laughter from audiences than The Guard. This low-budget, highbrow Irish comedy stars redheaded character actor Brendan Gleeson ...

It is summer in the city and the smell of trash rises from the hot streets. There is trash on the sidewalks, trash in the bookstores, and trash in the movie theaters. It is, as it ...

Writing about the differences between Canadians and Americans isn’t as easy as it used to be. In 2004, for instance, the night before George W. Bush made his first visit to ...

I hate when a famous junkie dies and we get empty gestures like, “We just lost a legend the likes of which we will never see again.” Why not say, “That cute English girl who ...

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—The thickly pined forested hills form a perfect backdrop to the not-so-wine-dark waters off the Peloponnese. Soft greens and blues are Edward Hopper ...

Project Nim is a critically praised documentary about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of one of those attempts to teach American Sign Language to an ape, a fad that ...

HOOTERS CASINO BLUES Dear Delphi, My best friend of more than twenty years and I decided to have a boys’ long weekend in Vegas just for laughs before we get any further into our ...

I’ve had a longstanding instinctive loathing of those who perpetrate gimmick art, a genre of which Lucian Freud was a master. His art was as sordid as his person, reflecting ...

When I first read Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future, better known as The Unabomber Manifesto, I was impressed with how logically dispassionate it was, especially ...

NEW YORK—I tried. I really tried. I wanted to be the only person in America who didn’t know anything about the Caylee Anthony murder case. I intentionally avoided it whenever ...