Taki's Top Drawer

Maugham’s the Word

At a male-only lunch high up in the Alps the subject of AI came up. We were five friends, and four of them were in favor. “But it will kill good writing,” said yours truly. The rest agreed. Info will trump grace, was the conclusion. Some time ago a friend had AI imitate my column and she played it back to me. I listened carefully. It was a good imitation of probably the worst writing I have ever done, clumsy, obvious, and phony. I recounted the story to my friends at lunch. “So what else is new about your bad writing?” said one of my oldest friends. Joking aside, no one reads any longer. When was the last time someone asked you what book you are reading. “What are you watching?” is what people ask nowadays. The devil screen is the enemy, and political correctness comes in a ...

Trump Cards

This is for you poker players out there: Trump appears to be conceding far too much to Russia, but it could be part of a plan. In poker, the strong hand plays it cool at the start. The weak one bluffs, pretending to be strong. Trump could be bluffing giving away too much, but perhaps that’s the only way to get Vlad involved and talking. Let’s face it: Ukraine has no cards to play with, and Europe is a busted flush. So why ...

Joan Collins in the film Empire of the Ants (1977)

Down the Toobin

Ah, the beauty of language! The English one is as rich as they come, with words such as “osculation,” “verbigeration,” “concupiscence,” “mithridatism,” and “onomatopoeia.” I could go on forever. The latest to be added to an already bulging dictionary is “Toobin.” For any of you unfamiliar with what doing a Toobin is, it is something most young people, especially boys, do while dreaming of sex with a ...

Gaza/Israeli border

‘Greater’ Israel

Oh dear—shock horror, rather—the first man to think about displacing a whole populace was one Adolf Hitler, although he never went through with it. He decided to kill them instead. I am talking about plans to deracinate the Gaza population to faraway places, 2 million souls in all, give or take 100,000, depending on the death toll of innocent old men, women, and children following the Israeli bombardment of the place. Yes, ...

Woke’s Gone Broke

Let’s take it from the top: DEI was destroying Western values and the culture of meritocracy. The bigots of woke culture subverted our institutions yet claimed to occupy the moral high ground. A nation’s historic culture and values were thrown into the dustbin, while the sinister system abolished free speech. It was a systemic attack on our free society by so-called elites—in reality a nefarious bunch of lefties whose ...

The Di Is Cast

Harry and Meghan looked like ambulance chasers in burning Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, but acting like virtue-signaling disaster tourists is what they do best. It does not surprise me. For those of you who don’t read comic books or gossip columns, they’re also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, he a Brit and she an American of mixed race. They’ve both become richer of late thanks to the lawsuit they brought ...

Cap-Ferrat

Don’t Forget Maugham

How do we recognize artistic merit today? What relation does it have with popularity? How important is fame in measuring the artist? Why is merit often unmatched by success, whereas the latter and mediocrity are almost one and the same? All one has to do is look at Hollywood and its products of nonstop horror films, but I’m not going there, the place is a burned-out case, pun intended. The vexing question implicit in my ...

Klemens von Metternich

Diplomacy of Debauchery

I no longer read today’s shysters, those grubby-fingered leeches called journalists, mostly because they’re as far removed from fairness and the truth as I am from LGBQTVMGM. The fact that Trump has won has not reminded them of their primary duty, which is to inform, not to convert. Most of them are envious creatures who erroneously believe in their moral superiority and their left-wing ideology, which is par for the ...

Fine Lines

I’ve received a very interesting letter from Nicholas Farrell, author of the best biography of Benito Mussolini yet written. It begins by introducing a good friend of his, a poet by the name of Paolo Gambi, a close relation to the last mistress of Lord Byron, Teresa Guiccioli. Teresa was most likely the last female affair the great Byron had before dying 200 years ago in Missolonghi, Greece, fighting the Turks for Greek ...

Murders Most Foul

I hate to start the year with a horror story, but Takimag readers must be told of the hellhole where it took place: New York City, once upon a time the best place to live and have fun in, now accurately described as a dangerous shithole. Actually it’s the people who have turned awful. A homeless woman is asleep in a subway car when she’s set alight by an illegal animal from Guatemala, and up she goes in flames and is burnt ...

Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda by Alfred Cheney Johnston, 1923

The Top Two

I’ve been catching up on my reading of late, and here’s the one and only Papa Hemingway’s advice to writers: “Don’t let them suck you in to start writing about the proletariat, if you don’t come from the proletariat, just to please the recently politically enlightened critics.” Hear, hear! Leave it to Papa to tell unpalatable truths, especially true today with the proles all-conquering and the nobs in hasty ...

Bethlehem, Palestine - Church of the Nativity

All-Conquering Israel

This is my last week in the Bagel and things are looking up. For some of us, that is; for others it’s despair time. No use beating around the bush: Israel has won big-time, Iran has lost big, and the Palestinians are back to ground zero, with nothing to look forward to except more deaths, more land grabs by Israeli settlers, and more crushing and brutal retaliation by Israel at the slightest indication of civil disobedience. ...

Stop the Press

No one sober and in their right mind trusts or believes in what is called the media nowadays. Once upon a time the news media in America was highly respected and trusted. It took professional liars who brought down a president who had won the largest majority ever, Richard Nixon, for the public to realize that journalists suffer from pathological distortion and suspicion. A lawyer can be disbarred, a priest can be defrocked, ...

Fred Astaire

Golden Oldies

I’ll report some good news for a change. Perhaps the most important event this year outside the presidential election is the imminent collapse of the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion con, the poisonous hokum that is finally being exposed as such. Just think of it: $8 billion a year of your taxes is spent telling Americans in training sessions, workshops, and educational material that they are, depending on their ...


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