When I learned that Martin Amis, the novelist, had died, I felt a stab of sorrow. I did not know him personally, and heard him speak only once, at the memorial service for an acquaintance of mine. He spoke well, but it was not an occasion for rhetorical brilliance. He behaved like a perfectly civilized man, and in a dignified and modest manner. Part of the reason for my sorrow was that Amis was only six weeks older than I, and therefore his death brought home to me by how thin a thread my own life is now suspended. He died of cancer of the esophagus, like his friend, the journalist ...
Obituary notices are not usually a source of great fun. If one should not speak ill of the recently dead, unless they were utter monsters such as Pol Pot, one should not speak facetiously of them, ...
I always knew that lifelong communist and serial race-denier Noel Ignatiev, who campaigned for decades that society needed to “abolish the white race,” was full of it. Allow me to take a sadistic ...
I call them the "Ackchyuallies": the concern trolls who reflexively politicize and pollute every occasion of mass recollection, wailing, "Columbus was a mass ...
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It would have been a surprise if the obituaries of Martin McGuinness, chief of staff of the Provisional IRA and subsequently a key figure in the peace process and then deputy ...
Jack Chick is dead, alas, and along with him any hope for new additions to his corpus of strangely endearing Evangelical scare tracts. Even those who aren"t aficionados ...
The dumbing down of the establishment left is amusingly illustrated by how the Southern Poverty Law Center, America's most lucrative hate group, put the great scientist Henry ...
Another day, another dead British rock star who famously flirted with fascist symbolism. Two weeks ago it was Lemmy, and now comes word that David Bowie has finally floated away ...
Right after I hit "send" on my second last column " the one about being short " I kicked myself (as best I could with these damn stubby legs) for forgetting to ...
After tormenting the rest of us for nigh on a century, last week that unrepentant communist and multimillionaire folk “singer” Pete Seeger was shipped off to the ...
The only man I know who belonged to more gentlemen's clubs than Eddie Ulmann was the late Bobby Sweeny of amateur golf fame, who once pleaded poverty to me while signing checks to ...
As a college student I would buy copies of The New Yorker to sample the sparkling prose of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman and to appreciate the clever cartoons that graced each ...
You will be missed, Hugo Chavez. The world has lost a man who was larger than life, and we don"t only mean your Body Mass Index. We will always love and admire you, even ...
The Grim Reaper thinned the herd of baby-boomer entertainment icons this summer. Ernest Borgnine, Andy Griffith, Phyllis Diller, William Windom, and"ahem"Scott McKenzie ...
Gore Vidal was as good as it gets where writing is concerned. I can"t think of a single awkward sentence he ever wrote, and he wrote a hell of a lot for someone from a very ...
Ray Bradbury is dead. For the past twenty years I have dreaded writing those words. The effusive homages to a man who was arguably America's greatest living writer are in full ...
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