Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode. First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.” “For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, “Israel is the heart. ... Israel is the light. ... Israel is the hope.” Meeting Shimon Peres the next day, Joe confessed that when he first visited at age 29, “Israel captured my heart.” In Peres’ guestbook, he wrote, “The bond between our two nations has … 
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I certainly don’t know much about investing, but I can give you one solid tip: don’t bet in the movie box office futures market. Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expects to get federal regulatory approval to begin trading movie pseudo-shares in April (and a start-up called Veriana Networks also hopes to get into the business). The rationalization is that movie-makers could unload some of the risk of a flop on investors, but the appeal is that it’s more fun than gambling on pork bellies. What could be a more perfect embodiment of our post-modern economy? While the Asians manufacture everything, Americans … 
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Like most butchers, Muhammad Bouyeri of the Hofstad Group is not a man of many doubts. When asked why he slaughtered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, he was succinct: “I was motivated by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.”  Most likely, Bouyeri was inspired by Chapter 47, verse 4 of the Qur’an which advises: “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely” or Chapter 8, verse 39, which commands war against unbelievers until ‘all chaos ceases and all … 
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Quaerite Prime Regnum Dei. When someone asks me where I’m from, usually after listening to me speak, then curiously cocking their head in a vain attempt to place my accent, I hesitate. I don’t hesitate because I’m not sure where I’m from. A few months off from high school trying my hand at door-to-door encyclopedia sales in the bitter Atlantic winter, meeting thousands of our hardworking men, women and children. An elderly mother in a small port village told me she had 22 girls, and then switched her fisherman husband’s diet from pork to chicken and finally bore a boy. Why … 
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      Zurich has a reputation for being stodgy, but it ain’t so, at least not after hours. On one of my first visits, I met a Dublin girl by the name of Mary O’Connell downstairs at the hotel bar, which was an Irish bar and a hot spot. She worked as an au pair for a rich family somewhere in the suburbs. Mary smoked incessantly, her working papers were undated, and I could barely comprehend a word of what Mary said. Her brogue was thick, her words were slurred on top of that, and she talked non-stop with a … 
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Much as it pains me to do so I fear that I must praise a left leaning economist. Dean Baker, please stand up and take your bow. He’s told the truth, always a bad career move in the political arena, about the current financial crisis and recession. We’re not deep in the economic doo doo because Wall Streeters are greedy, not because they’re incompetent and not because they’re evil. They may be all of these things but the ordure piled up around our ears is not because of their actions or existence, but because we’ve just had a huge housing bubble. … 
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Gstaad. A lovely liquid lunch in a mountain hut with my friend Nicola Anouilh after two hard runs. Blue skies, gentle winds, a few puffs of white cloud, and the sound of bells from the nearby cow shed. If there’s a better way of communing with nature, I haven’t come across it yet. The natural beauty of the Alps is unspoiled and majestically alluring.  White wine helps one dream and feel at peace with the world, until, that is, we’re back on skis and losing altitude fast. The bumps come up fast and in a blur, and turning uphill in order … 
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New York seems to be full of people who go to shop openings and social events just to be seen. I don’t much care for these parties because I would rather see my friends privately, and have an actual conversation, than feign interest in something I don’t care about like a handbag with Tinsley Mortimer’s name on it. Being photographed at one of these events in the hope that I might appear in some magazine that will be looked at by people I don’t know isn’t the sort of validation I was brought up wanting. I would prefer instead to be … 
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“Is Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead simply glib and superficial?” Some thirty years ago now, it was one of the English essay questions put to me in my final year at high school.  My written answer—‘Yes’—was perhaps itself a little glib and superficial and deserving of its low mark.  But I was eighteen years old and going for the laugh.  I suspect they would not ask such questions these days, for it would be deemed too demanding, too excluding, too elitist, too unfair.  After all, it would require a pupil to read, comprehend, think, and write.  Heaven forbid.  In … 
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In synopsis, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lapidary first work of fiction by Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason, sounds like an overly clever postmodern literary jest. This elegant collection of very short stories consists of 44 purported pre-Homeric variations on the legends of the Trojan War and the pragmatic Odysseus’s homeward wanderings, as recounted in the arch manner of a more recent blind poet, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges (1899-1986), composer of metaphysical conundrums about infinite libraries, has become a Siren for bookish young men of the computer age. I first read Borges several decades ago. Overwhelmed, I immediately … 
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