I first met the man whose opioid products have supposedly killed 200,000 Americans 51 years ago, at the Hotel du Cap-d’Antibes. Mortimer Sackler looked old even back then, had a Noo Yawk accent, and without ever having been introduced approached me after a tennis match I had just lost with some ...
NEW YORK—This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Muslims, Druze, and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling WASPs are dead and buried, having moved to their country clubs in the ...
NEW YORK CITY—Goodbye, snowcapped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings, choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. ...
As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants while he was about to be executed by the Mexicans, “Who knew?” Last week the owner of the Palace hotel in Gstaad rang me and asked me to join him for a drink with Akira Kitade, a well-known Japanese author, best known for Visas of Life ...
As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer’s daughter. Not so fast, as they say. I live among farmers and haystacks up here in the Alps, and I’ve yet to run into a farmer’s daughter who is worth the buckshot in the ...
A rare British species, a womanizing ex–foreign minister, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last week, and it brought back memories of a similar tryst by yours truly. Boris Johnson reclined on a bed of straw with a purring cheetah and lived to write about it ...
Hold the presses! More Germans trust Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Trump’s United States. This is earth-shattering news, a scoop like no other. If this were 1969 the moon landing would be a smaller headline. And guess who came up with the scoop: none other than The New York Times, the paper that ...
The troubles with the modern world are too numerous to list, technology being among the worst offenders. Just imagine how much better off we’d be if there were no plastic bags to pollute our oceans and rivers, no soulless supermarkets but proper butcher shops, no imported European foods but ...
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 ...
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, ...
