Envy is one of the seven deadly sins but ever present among the writing classes. One would think they’d fake it, but envy, like unrequited love, cannot be easily hidden. I recently read a review of a Bill Buckley biography, one that pricked my fairness button despite the writer’s pretense of ...
The American Revolution was the first step in a global upheaval that would do away with a system called monarchy, creating a new world of equality and freedom. On paper this sounds about perfect, n’est-ce pas, as our French friends say, but in actual fact a few years later the Haitians revolted ...
Okay, sports fans, here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth: The year was 1957 or 1958 or perhaps even later. Those were the days of starched shirts, good manners, white rather than yellow tennis balls, and wooden rackets. The tournament was in New York City, and I was playing against Yale No. ...
Civilizations are impermanent, according to optimists. Simple accumulations of wealth and power are bound to fail, according to pessimists. I am somewhere in between, a firm believer that nothing can be sustained over the long term, with human fallibility precipitating the final collapse. The ...
This is the saddest column I’ve had to write in fifty years: Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving eating once a day, if that, every two or three days. America’s great ally Israel is imposing the starvation as a tool of war, something not even Nazi ...
The opening sentence of a book can make or break it at times. Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” intrigued to no end. No, it wasn’t Captain Ahab speaking but a minor character in the hard-to-read novel. The great Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man ...
“Protect America from America’s President,” screams a New York Times headline. “His officers grab people off the streets,” rants a columnist whose name reminds me of the nice doctor who administers colonoscopies. (Mind you, colonoscopies can benefit one; left-wing buffoons like Times ...
Okay, history buffs, I write this on April 19, 2025, exactly 250 years from that most famous of midnight runs, that of Paul Revere and William Dawes to warn fellow patriots that the British army was on the march. Popular legend has it that Paul warned them by yelling, “The British are coming, the ...
Like everyone else I met on an overnight meeting in the Bahamas, I am worried about a recession. The world’s largest economy could dip into one, and very quickly, said a multibillionaire attending the same party as me. Personally, I have never understood much about economics. I have always left ...
