Climate change is an existential threat—this according to our Department of Defense. Not a military but a political position, the mentality comes from an intellectual spectrum that focuses as well on critical race theory and gender fluidity. Even ...

Apparently, I’m not controversial enough. So get your teeth into this: Communism did some good. Not the starvation, massacres, and bad plumbing. Nor the chronically dysfunctional art. Admittedly not the architecture. Or—despite the best efforts ...

You are not where you think you are, reading this: not at home, nor on your yacht, nor hiding from the law in some overripe equatorial dump. Unfurling the crisp pages of Takimag over your morning schnapps, you are somewhere quite different: deep in ...

Clothes are the carriage of the soul. Like the soul, they should be well-made and un-ostentatious. No one expressed this better than Beau Brummell when he said, “It should take at least five minutes from a man entering the room to noticing he’s ...

Another British royal wedding is hoving ineluctably into view. I was at the last one. The memory of that candyfloss patriotism still makes me puke. Noam Chomsky likes opining about the “manufacture of consent.” Royal weddings represent an even ...

I am offended when people ask if I write under a pen name. The question seems to cast aspersions on a century of Mortimer family history—of which three generations have carried the same given name as I. Are we to understand that the names of other ...

Hey, Zuckerberg? You reading this? Just a quick note to say you can have all the data you want. Fill your boots. Because nothing your corporate cronies do is going to influence me one iota. Not one jot. Trying to target me with “messaging,” as ...

And so to that rainy mecca of Western values, London. Or erstwhile mecca, I should say. The talk there is of the end of a reign of terror. Its queen regnant was a lady called Alison Saunders. I say lady purely to pique her; she wasn’t a lady and ...

“Hangover cure”—like military intelligence—is an oxymoron. If hangovers could be cured, they wouldn’t exist. Maybe one day it will happen, and some penicillin of the brain will sweep away these days of paroxysm. I’m told the Russians ...

Word reached me that Friends—the anodyne ’90s “sitcom”—has riled the snowflakes. Its transgression is that it meets Stendhal’s definition of fiction: to be a mirror walking down the main street. On Friends, people act normally. The ...

Please accompany me along the career trajectory of my English friend Minty. She receives an expensive education at which she is careful not to excel. She then wanders the world, trying on ethnic clothes and people. Having broken a few hearts in ...

Your musical day should start with works written closest to our own time, then work backward. The reason is simple. Nineteenth-century music is filled with the forward momentum necessary for the mornings; whereas early music—similar to jazz—is ...