Ruins of Kenidjack arsenic works Cornwall UK

Poison Pen

One of the great pleasures of retirement is that one can lie abed in the morning and read Agatha Christie without any feeling of guilt—guilt about being late for work, for example. It doesn’t matter in the least if one gets up at eleven: One hasn’t anything else important, or ...

Biden’s Three Paths to Victory

Democrats have three paths to victory next November, all being eagerly embraced by Republicans. PLAN A: Enrage Republicans by bringing a string of ludicrous indictments, civil suits and ballot disqualifications against Donald Trump, thus tricking the GOP into making him the nominee. RESULT: Joe ...

Adoration of the Magi, Rubens, 1634

Believe It or Not

My, my, how the years pass by. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve written a Christmas piece for Takimag, but the years have passed in an eye blink. Recently I asked myself, why do bad things happen to good people? (Well, not very good people, but well-intentioned.) This question has occupied ...

Tyrone Bogues

The Tall and Short of It

What’s the most common first name for an African-American NBA player? D’Qantivious? T’Variusness? Nah, it turns out that black pro basketball players are most commonly named Chris, followed by similarly middle-class names such as James, Marcus, Mike, and Eric. According to data scientist ...

Susan Sarandon

Calvin and Hobbled

Here’s a little secret regarding opinion pieces: It’s all about “angle.” You look at something in the news, and you find an interesting angle for your readers. Case in point: the recent L.A. freeway fire that crippled the I-10 Downtown. As there’d been a homeless encampment under that ...

Hunter Biden

Biden His Crime

As Christmas approaches, many of us face the prospect of spending time captive in the company of embarrassing relatives—a fate that even affects the highest in the land. Down the years, America’s presidents have had many black sheep in the First Family, perhaps none greater than Bill ...

The Week That Perished

The Week’s Most Hopping, Bopping, and Last-Minute-Shopping Headlines MAGILL, A GORILLA In a coda to the disastrous congressional testimony by U Penn president Liz Magill and Harvard Affirmative Action zombie Claudine Gay during a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses, it turns out that ...

Why Does Washington Want to Destroy America’s ‘Magnificent 7’?

Nothing exemplifies America's tech industry dominance in the global economy more than the meteoric rise of what is now being called the "Magnificent Seven" stocks -- Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. These companies single-handedly account for nearly all the gains in the ...

A dike in Dutch National Park De Biesbosch

Not-So-Scary Truth About Climate Change

United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to "solve" climate change. Then he says, "There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem." Kerry has little understanding of money or how it's created. He's ...

Rosa Parks

Mirror-Image Racism

Nothing could better illustrate or be emblematic of the earnest suicidal frivolity of the West than the decision of the first female chief executive of the British insurance and pension company Aviva, which has assets of more than $420 billion under management, that the appointment to all senior ...