NEW YORK—This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Muslims, Druze, and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian ...

NEW YORK CITY—Goodbye, snowcapped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings, choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, ...

As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants while he was about to be executed by the Mexicans, “Who knew?” Last week the owner of the Palace hotel in Gstaad ...

As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer’s daughter. Not so fast, as they say. I live among farmers ...

A rare British species, a womanizing ex–foreign minister, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last week, and it brought back memories of a ...

This is party time in Gstaad. From the richest billionaires down to some impoverished souls with only a few million to their name, “the joint is jumpin’.” Last week one ...

Who was it who said we always hurt those we love the most? I did just that last week, skiing out of control, making a sharp left turn, and crashing into my wife, Alexandra—a ...

Here in Gstaad there is no worker alienation. Nor are the rich especially worried. The talk is about snow conditions, upcoming parties, the price of real estate, Brexit, and, of ...

“The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.” This is a direct quote from last week’s New ...

Asked how he was feeling as he was about to give a speech to a ladies’ group, Mark Twain looked horror-stricken and said: “How do you expect me to feel? Shakespeare is dead, ...

Do any of you know what a cisgender is? I just found out. A cisgender is a term describing someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing ...

Funny thing is, I was in school with a man named Ted Widmer, and I recently read that one Ted Widmer is a “distinguished lecturer” at a New York university and is senior ...

GSTAAD—My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended up asking men and women to please leave my bedroom, especially my ...

NEW YORK—At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The reality is an urban agglomeration of millions, most of them with a disinclination to ...

What I should have done is gone out and bought a lottery ticket. I’ll explain: The snow suddenly came down in buckets, icing the city and bringing gridlock like I’ve never ...

NEW YORK—A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of Nov. 9, 2018, becoming my third grandchild. Through modern technology I ...