Health-Care Assassin’s Creed

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 deserved to die. Certainly he didn’t. And not because it’s cool to make a political statement by murdering someone. It isn’t. But there are so many random, meaningless killings in urban America these days, it’s nice to know that occasionally there are still murders with meaning. I’m not saying the meaning was good. I’m just saying, at least it was intentional. The newspapers are filled daily with stories of a ...

Katie Britt

The Will to Outrage

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 ...

An Answer to Inequity

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 ...

Playing Dumb

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 ...

The Eye in the Sky

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 ...

The Wonder App

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 ...

Harlem women, circa 1925

Migration Nation

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 ...

Berlin, Germany

Little Platoons of Monomaniacs

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 ...

A Political Impasse

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 ...

Heinrich Himmler

One Singular Gen-sation

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 ...

Drink Your Port While You Can

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 ...

A Pug’s Life

I have never really understood why people like pug dogs. They seem to me ugly, they run to fat, and because of their pushed-in snouts and widely spaced eyes, they are ...

Children at Checkout

It is a trope of many intellectuals that to stack shelves in a supermarket, or to work at a supermarket checkout, is the worst fate that can befall a human being. Such a job is ...

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

The Final Solution to the Rightist Problem

1991–1994: the heyday of “Holocaust revisionism” in America, with four major national TV shows (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Montel Williams, Phil Donahue) giving ...


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