A Service Economy Without Service

Recently, I had the doubtful pleasure of flying aboard British Airways back to London. No doubt the airline is safe, its pilots well-trained and its maintenance staff competent; and these are no small virtues in an airline, you might well say. Moreover, the plane took off and landed on time, even if it took half an hour for a space to be found for it ...


Queen Elizabeth II

Diamond Jubilation

I love Queen Elizabeth. I love her pastel-colored outfits. I love her little black handbags. I love the regal look in her eye. I even love it when she has to wear her silly crown and sit on a throne in Westminster Abbey covered in ...

Colombia Lectures the USA About Drugs

On the drug war’s fortieth anniversary, the news from the front is rather grim. In Mexico, the clashes between the army and the formidable drug cartels have caused nearly 35,000 deaths in the past four years. In Afghanistan, opium ...

Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein in Hindsight: The Moses of Nerds

The rise of the nerds to mainstream dominance is one of popular culture's most important developments over the last generation. Consider the gulf in sensibility between old Hollywood blockbusters such as Gone with the Wind and ...

Celebrity Child-Support Sweepstakes

Over the past few days the Greatest Show on Earth has rolled into town. This carnival is complete with its very own troop of freaks, and its ringmaster is cad-about-town Charlie Sheen. Lest one be too hard on young Mr. Sheen, it ought ...

Paris Hilton is a Naughty Girl, and Other Felonies

They say she's an heiress, but I say she's more like trailer trash. She wears a lot of Pepto Bismol pink and prances around like an innocent little doll, but make no mistake about it, Paris Hilton is a naughty girl. Before the age of ...

The Banier-Bettencourt Brouhaha

Until recently, I had never heard of Liliane Bettencourt, the sole heiress to the L"€™Oreal fortune and France's richest woman. I can"€™t say that I care much now that I have, even though it seems like all of France is in a twist ...

Long Live Queen Elizabeth

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is visiting us here in Manhattan this week. As I write this, she has just got through delivering an address to the U.N. General Assembly, 16 of whose member nations have her as their head of state. The ...

The Death of the WASP

A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about “how we"€™re all WASPs now” made me realize that Brookhiser's statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he's saying. ...


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