New York, NY

Watch Your Mouth

There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought police, and hard-eyed women roaming the television studios with lists of sexual predators. There is also dread over the latest exports from the city’s youth detention centers, thanks to Kerry Kennedy, ...

The World Looks the Other Way

Is Mohammad bin Salman a murderer? Is it fair to say he is a hairy coward who has starved millions of children in Yemen? Did his crawling parasites dismember Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last week? Is this man a perverted sadist? If so, this is the real scandal. I doubt much will come of this ...

Countess Maya von Schoenburg

Teutonic Tales

The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding-dong, ding-dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. From my window I look at them and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells, day and night, and their sounds accompany me while I hit the makiwara. I like it ...

Ronan Farrow

London, Under One Condition

To London for much too brief a visit for a wedding, lunch with commodore Tim Hoare, and a look-see for a house. Yes, I am returning to live in London, but under one condition: It’s called Corbyn, and if he comes in, I won’t. It’s rather cowardly, I know, but I did live in London during the ...

Soc, Witt, and Taki

The grandest view of Gstaad and the surrounding Saanen valley bar none—and that includes the vista from my high-up-on-the-hill farm—belongs to an imposing house that was originally a sanatorium but is now a home for the blind. It’s ironic to be located where only eagles dare, yet unable to ...

Who the Hell is Manny Klein?

Perception and reality, truth and falsehood, black and white; nowadays the salivating chattering classes don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, as they used to say in Brooklyn before the yuppies moved in. Take, for example, the latest kerfuffle about the moon landing 49 years ago. I ...

Serena Williams

Reading and Raging

A letter from a reader in South Africa mentions that the writer’s father insisted a white dinner jacket was permissible only in Palm Beach, Biarritz, or the Riviera. I agree and stand corrected, having worn one at the Duke of Beaufort’s bash last July, but a heat wave is my excuse. England was ...

PC Marches On

Some of you oldies will never believe this, but London is no longer the place of The Blue Lamp and other black-and-white golden oldies that were made in the Shepperton and Elstree studios by the great Rank and Korda organizations. During the postwar years, with rationing on and the empire still ...

Greece Isn’t Back, but Taki Is

Some jerk know-nothing writes in an unreadable American newspaper that Greece is back—Athens, actually. He would; he’s an American who probably thinks that the lack of starving Greek beggars in the streets à la Calcutta back in the 1920s means we’re back. Have another hamburger, asshole, and ...

The Academy of Athens

Forum of Fools

The New York Times has announced a forum to discuss democracy in the cradle of democracy, Athens, sometime in September of this year. It is as if the late John Gotti held a forum to discuss crime in Chicago, God rest his soul. Gotti committed crimes in order to live like a Sulzberger. Sulzberger ...