Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it was Santayana, and boy, did he ever get it right. My friend ...

GSTAAD—I cross-country ski the old-fashioned way, not skating but on machine-made narrow tracks. It is known to be the best exercise in the world, both upper and lower body ...

GSTAAD—Okay, sports fans, have you been enjoying the concentration-camp Olympics? I’m sure the Uighurs in the Chinese gulag are riveted, especially watching the downhill, the ...

GSTAAD—Joan Didion, who died December last, took herself extremely seriously. American writers tend to do that, especially those whose books are unreadable, the kind that win ...

GSTAAD—Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: Did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The ...

GSTAAD—According to a little bird Boris has gone from brilliant to bawd, and according to me this village has gone from unlivable to perfect in one easy week. The slopes are ...

GSTAAD—Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black-and-white TV? Actually it was yours truly after watching the slobs parading up and down Gstaad’s main street. ...

A revisionist-historian-anthropologist-anarchist, whose name is not important because his works are based on personal assumptions and prejudices, insists in a book he co-wrote ...

GSTAAD—It is hard to imagine we have reached the year 2022 and still impose completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. By “we” I mean those of us in the supposedly ...

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman, and never ...

Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper of its most populous city launches a totally mendacious project reinterpreting its past. The practice was perfected during ...

NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are now a thing of the past, at least here in the Bagel, so it’s ...

NEW YORK—Will the American media ever face a reckoning for its fake Russia collusion and anti-Trump hysteria that lasted close to four years and was the main weapon of the lefty ...

NEW YORK—I’ve never met anyone named Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men by that name in Africa. The only one referred to as Othello, but ...

NEW YORK CITY—Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamic gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No ...

There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormond Gate that reminds me of postwar London when I first came here with my dad. Names like ...