Gee, Why Can’t Trump Accept Defeat Like the Democrats?

In 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, 489-49 in the Electoral College. So naturally, Democrats concluded that Reagan had committed ...

St. George's Cathedral, Beirut

Lebanese Echoes

Exactly fifty years ago last month I was lolling by the pool of the St. Georges Hotel in Beirut surrounded by bikini-clad women of uncertain virtue, spooks, pimps, journalists, ...

The Luxembourg Gardens, Felix Vallotton

Life BC

Now that academics have abandoned BC (Before Christ) for BCE (Before the Common Era), though without explaining for whom or to what the Era is Common, the initials BC are ...

History’s Mysteries

There comes a time in life when one is more interested in the past than in the future. In my case, I reached it very early: I cannot remember a time when the past was not more ...

The Islamic Renaissance

The “Islamic Renaissance” that Sultan Erdogan campaigns for today has little to do with what the Christian world experienced centuries ago. Then, Europe unearthed the beauty ...

1968 Again

I have never been quite able to make up my mind whether there is no new thing under the sun or whether we live in completely unprecedented times. When we look at events close up ...

Lady Prue Penn

From Great Boredom Come Great Tales

When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s recent Spectator notes also helped; for example, his stories about the ...

Scott Rosendall

Today I Settle All Family Business

As this week’s column will run on the final day of the year, I thought I’d break format and do something a little different. People often ask me, “Dave, where do you get ...

Pete Buttigieg

The 19 Most Annoying People of 2019

Another year, another 365 days of walking, talking human headaches. Sometimes I don’t know why I simply don’t look away from it all—and then, when I can’t come up with an ...

Khor Virap Monastery in Armenia close to Turkish border

USA Drops a Guilt Bomb on Turkey

War is fought on two fronts: the battlefield and the mind. Whereas superior strategy and firepower wins it on the battlefield, the war for the mind is won by successfully ...

Summer Love

The only true love is summer love, as the saying by Giacomo Casanova goes. Actually it’s mine, as the Venetian was too slick to differentiate between love seasons. The reason I ...

Ayacucho, Peru

The Choice Between Bad and Worse

Pedants delight in error, not in truth, and fall upon it like scavengers on a carcass. I have books, pre-owned—or even pre-loved, as dealers in secondhand objects are now ...

Thurgood Marshall

My Marshall Plan

Over Memorial Day weekend, some shocking news broke about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. David Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, came across some new details about ...

Alexandra Ocasio Cortez

The 18 Most Annoying People of 2018

Another year has passed. Let us shove it off the cliff and watch its brains get bashed to paste on the rocks as it falls. Let seagulls peck at its flesh on the wet, cold sand ...

Is This Worse Than ’68?

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by ...

Jot This Down

In Chekhov’s The Seagull, there is a character called Trigorin. He is a writer (a good writer, he thinks his epitaph will say, but not as good as Turgenev) who has always a ...


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