NEW YORK—Today’s protesters could learn something from Sophocles. A man before his time (496-406 BC), Sophocles was a schoolmate of mine, although he was a few years ...

A few years ago I received a telephone call from a college fundraising creep looking for a handout. I don’t have any money to spare, but I innocently inquired how they’d ...

During this cozy holiday season it’s worth taking a step back from the football game and having a good hard stare at the baby boomers who made you. What is with these people? ...

I am a pessimist, for reasons I have expatiated upon at book length. In that book’s first chapter, I distinguished two usages of the key word: I’m using the word ...

It has been a common maxim for the past few thousand years to “seize the day.” I have never advocated this indulgent philosophy. Too often it results in giving away all ...

The Descendants, with George Clooney as a Hawaiian land dynasty’s 1/32nd-Polynesian scion, has fans asking where writer-director Alexander Payne has been since 2004’s ...

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing Oprah Winfrey likes to recall how excited her neighbors got the first time The Supremes ...

German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch published a far-ranging 2003 study on the culture of defeated nations that focuses on three cases: the American South after the Civil War, ...

A report released Wednesday says that in 2010, one in five Americans took medication to relieve conditions broadly described as mental disorders. Such medications include ...

It really is possible to change your attitudes, even in…well, let’s say late middle age. Case in point: Florida. Which is to say, me and Florida. To reverse Dr. Johnson’s ...

NEW YORK—I had a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious week—so good, it took a weekend in Connecticut to recover from it. Let’s begin with the Norman Mailer benefit gala. The ...

Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the Washington bureaucrat who ran the FBI and its predecessor from 1924 to his death in early 1972, provides an ...

A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend ...

New federal regulations make it mandatory for religious broadcasters to put captions for the deaf under their TV programming unless they can prove that paying for running text ...

A hallelujah chorus of joyous whoops and hollers erupted from an audience described as “mostly African Americans” as the Texas DMV voted on Thursday to reject a license-plate ...

“There’s nothin’ like having a nation of fags looking for you,” joked Eddie Murphy in his 1987 stand-up comedy film Raw. He was referring to a backlash over his previous ...