Summer Love

The only true love is summer love, as the saying by Giacomo Casanova goes. Actually it’s mine, as the Venetian was too slick to differentiate between love seasons. The reason I find summer love the truest is because it has its limits. ...

Ayacucho, Peru

The Choice Between Bad and Worse

Pedants delight in error, not in truth, and fall upon it like scavengers on a carcass. I have books, pre-owned—or even pre-loved, as dealers in secondhand objects are now inclined to call them—in which pedants have underlined or ...

Thurgood Marshall

My Marshall Plan

Over Memorial Day weekend, some shocking news broke about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. David Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, came across some new details about the FBI's secret bugs of King in the National Archives. ...

Alexandra Ocasio Cortez

The 18 Most Annoying People of 2018

Another year has passed. Let us shove it off the cliff and watch its brains get bashed to paste on the rocks as it falls. Let seagulls peck at its flesh on the wet, cold sand until the year’s ravaged corpse rolls into the sea foam, ...

Is This Worse Than ’68?

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of ...

Jot This Down

In Chekhov’s The Seagull, there is a character called Trigorin. He is a writer (a good writer, he thinks his epitaph will say, but not as good as Turgenev) who has always a little notebook with him to take down the interesting things ...

When Paris Shut Down

Bonjour, mes amis! Fifty years ago this month I was living in Paris and life was, shall we say, grand. Back then there was nothing like Paris in the spring and early summer, with formal balls galore, polo in the Bois de Boulogne, and ...

Adam Parfrey Saved My Life

During his 61 years on this earth, Adam Parfrey was called a fascist, a commie, a Nazi, a misogynist, a right-wing conspiracy nut, a left-wing conspiracy nut, a satanist, a warmonger, and a peacenik. If there’s a divisive term, he was ...

Ski Salons

What I miss most up here in the Alps are the literary lunches conducted on the fly with writers like Bill Buckley, Alistair Horne, Natasha Stewart, occasionally Dmitri Nabokov, and, yes, movie star and memoirist par excellence David ...

Bill Kristol

The 17 Most Annoying People of 2017

Writing this on New Year’s Eve and staring at the past annum in the rearview mirror, you can bet every last hair on your ass that I’m annoyed. Then again, I’m offended by nothing and bothered by everything. With the stark and ...

Robert Mugabe

Poor Robert Mugabe

After 37 years of murderous and destructive rule, it looks like the curtain is finally coming down on the Mugabe regime. Military coups are seldom welcome, but few of Zimbabwe’s beleaguered citizenry are unhappy with this dramatic ...

Jerry Pournelle

In Memoriam: Jerry Pournelle

My friend Jerry Pournelle has died at age 84. Jerry was the embodiment of a famous quote by his mentor in the science-fiction business, Robert A. Heinlein: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a ...


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