Tell It to the Saudis

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 tycoon converted his mega-chalet into a nightclub and the music bombed away all night. Everyone who attended turned into ...

Crash Course

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 beautiful and terrific skier—who was standing still under a mogul. As I knocked her down, my skis ran over her face, ...

Life’s Too Short for Envy

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 course, socialism, a disease that strikes those far away from this alpine resort, but has yet to infect any of the ...

Boris Johnson

Slop-Ed

“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 York Times, a newspaper that is known for being anti–heterosexual white male, anti-Christian, and now anti–British ...

Analyze This

Everyone’s rather angry nowadays. Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, people with special needs, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re angry. The Donald seems to have finally united the United ...

Roger Federer

Tennis Is the Best Medicine

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, Goethe is dead, and I have a terrible cold.” Alas, I’m no Twain, but I feel worse than the Mississippi sage ever did, ...

Ava Gardner

Legends Have It

It is normal in the hyperbolic times we’re living in to call people iconic or legendary. Both “hyperbole” and “iconic” are Greek words, and they were coined in order to separate the normal from the legendary. The trouble is that today the word “legendary” is overused. Untalented ...

Wengen, Switzerland

Nil Desperandum

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 isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my Spectator colleague ...

Resist, I Guess

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 fellow at the “Council for Ethics” in international affairs. The Ted I knew was anything but ethical, and dressed rather ...

All Downhill From Here

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 bathroom. I had some very pretty young things drop in and some even overstayed, and—surprise, surprise—there were ...