Recently, I read a small masterpiece of Soviet literature (or at least a masterpiece of literature written in the Soviet Period, which is perhaps not quite the same thing). It was Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya, written from 1937 to 1940, its survival a little miracle in itself. Chukovskaya was born in St. Petersburg and lived in Leningrad but was evacuated just before the siege by the invading Germans. She had written Sofia Petrovna by hand in a school exercise book, but it would obviously have been dangerous to take so anti-Soviet a manuscript with her into exile, so she entrusted it ...
Reading a newspaper headline recently—on my telephone, of course—I suddenly became aware of a terrible injustice that was about to be done to me. The headline proclaimed that 70 was the new 60, ...
1. I will try to be a more humble -- or even a little bit humble -- and will encourage my fellow Indians to cease producing reams of articles with headlines like these: -- "Indians flying high in ...
I don’t want to come off as lacking empathy, even though I do indeed lack empathy. The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is reassuring. Not because he ...
A long-lived creature from Mars, who had paid the earth visits over several centuries, would be very much struck by modern man’s thirst for, or indifference to, ugliness. He, ...
Remember Charles Rothenberg? Hopefully not, as it’s a most unpleasant memory. In the early 1980s, Rothenberg was locked in a bitter custody dispute with his wife, Marie, over ...
No one, I imagine, would include a speech by Donald Trump in an anthology of succinctness or political eloquence. Whether he is too lazy to organize his thoughts, or simply ...
Whenever I hear the word equity, my heart sinks, though I won’t go as far as to say that I reach for my Browning. My irritation on hearing the word is recent, however: I don’t ...
Recently, I read a splendid book, titled Homo cretinus, by the French science journalist and writer Olivier Postel-Vinay, on the subject of human stupidity, a subject as ...
From time to time I receive, unsolicited, messages from insurance companies about “how to keep myself safe,” to use an odious modern locution. Mostly they are about the ...
We have had an outbreak of golden orioles at my house in France. There are, of course, far worse outbreaks to have, but it is a little frustrating that these beautiful birds (the ...
While reading a new study by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery, about how it is better for African Americans today to be ...
What you deem to have been recent depends very much on your age. What is recent to an old man is prehistory to the young. To me, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe seems ...
In life, we are always dancing on the edge of a volcano. The dance may last longer than it did in times gone by, what with the great increase of life expectancy; nevertheless what ...
I hate the Holocaust. There, I’ve said it. Somebody had to. Funny thing is, nobody likes the Holocaust. Except maybe the folks at the ADL and Wiesenthal Center who’ve made ...
My memory is good in almost exact proportion to the uselessness of the information I call upon it to memorize. Why this should be, I do not know; perhaps it is an unconscious ...
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