In the Shadow of the Yanks

Everything was bigger with the Yanks: their soldiers, their food, and their imaginations. I was in the cookhouse with them in Kuwait before we tore across the border. We Brits had ...

Libera

The Rebel Cow of Predappio

I was wading through the daily mire of newspaper headlines the other day about the deepening euro crisis and the latest rich or famous Italian to be arrested when I saw this: ...

Will.I.Am

Floating Safely Amid the Waste

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—I made a resolution long ago never to mention the Olympics, but resolutions are made to be broken. My uncle competed in Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in ...

Barack Obama and Eric Holder

Jackass: The Government

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Naples, Florida

Places White People Like

I hadn’t read The Smithsonian for years. Back in the 1970s I actually subscribed to it. That was in the days when Stephen Jay Gould contributed columns to the magazine. I ...

Lars von Trier

Twilight of the Übermensch

You probably haven"€™t heard of Get the Gringo, a recent Lethal Weapon-like action movie starring Mel Gibson and directed by his right-hand man Adrian Grunberg. Mad Mel plays ...

Paris Jackson

Billionaires, Bimbos, and the Black Brady Bunch

London's big scandal this past week involves a rapper, a Rothschild, and a handsome son of the late businessman James Goldsmith. The British tabloids have been going bananas ...

Building Bridges and Making Soldiers

The Royal Engineers did anything the Army needed"€”from building bridges to crossing rivers, from building camps to clearing mines"€”so they needed to be tough soldiers. They ...

Madonna

Do Italians Do it Better?

That slogan on pop star Madonna's T-shirt "€œItalians do it better!"€ may date back to the 1980s but it is still popular with Italian men. They often deploy it to impress ...

Congratulations, Gov’nor!

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Dial 911 for Mommy

After leaving dinner with my in-laws here in Brooklyn on Monday, I saw two men standing on the curb looking very righteous. One was Asian and the other was white, which in this ...

Ray Bradbury

Someone Righteous This Way Went

Ray Bradbury is dead. For the past twenty years I have dreaded writing those words. The effusive homages to a man who was arguably America's greatest living writer are in full ...

Banksy

Royal Pains

After four days of royalist reverie, the imported Union Jacks are starting to sag"€”drooping disconsolately as the proud people who "€œnever ever shall be slaves"€ shake ...

Madonna, Don”€™t Preach

Always one to court controversy in lieu of talent, Madonna recently projected an enormous image of right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen with a swastika on her forehead à ...

The Undead & The Brain-Dead

Mass news reports last week of an impending “Zombie Apocalypse” proved that while the apocalypse may not have arrived quite yet, there are plenty of zombies waiting ...

The “€œF”€ Word

Although the adjective "€œfascist,"€ as George Orwell pointed out during and right after World War II, was a slur applied to "€œthose we don"€™t like,"€ the ...


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