In our disillusioning modern world, where it’s too easy to look up what life is actually like in the remote real places that used to serve our desire for utopias, Americans now ...

Your musical day should start with works written closest to our own time, then work backward. The reason is simple. Nineteenth-century music is filled with the forward momentum ...

The president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, the colorful Zulu polygamist with, at last count, six wives and 21 children, is in trouble with his ruling African National Congress ...

Last week I stayed in a part of London on the border between a rich and a poor part of the city: on one side houses costing millions, on the other side social housing for the ...

Joseph Campbell suggested as a matter of fact that Westerners do not consider the Chinese to be people. It’s why the Chinese have a portrait of Mao hanging from one “Gate of ...

There is nothing quite as pleasing as to contemplate the imminent end of the world or the downfall of civilization. It gives you a sense of superiority for having recognized it ...

I went last week to a production of Rigoletto, the revival of a production first staged in 2001. A criticism that I read in advance informed me that the initial orgy scene had ...

While researching a book recently, I came across the figure of Max Plowman, a minor writer of the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and very early ’40s (he died in 1941). His name rang ...

I suspect that I am of the last generation that ever considers writing anything by longhand. Indeed, there are reported to be places in America where children are no longer even ...

Paris is by far the best city in the world for cinema. At least, it is the best city known to me; perhaps Irkutsk or Conakry are better, though I rather doubt it. You could see ...

The new Steven Spielberg historical drama The Post is a celebration of how Democrats turn lemons into lemonade via their control of the media. A prequel to the 1976 Watergate ...

It’s that time of the year again. As Coca-Cola’s magic truck trundles across our televisions and Starbucks’ ubiquitous red cups punctuate the daily commute, the terror ...

There’s actually a sane, quite reasonable explanation for why so much of the media’s embarrassing levels of Trump Trauma and Putin Psychosis stem from Jewish paranoia. In the ...

In the 1972 black comedy The Ruling Class, Peter O’Toole plays Jack, a paranoid schizophrenic British nobleman who thinks he’s Jesus. Jack’s family members hatch a plot to ...

After hitting the skids a few years ago, I moved to Serbia. Hell, it was fun. Belgrade had been bombed in ’99. The laser-guided ordnance was so accurate it could follow streets. ...

Joseph de Maistre, the great Catholic reactionary thinker, conceived of intellectuals as grotesque, loathsome beings, because their cleverness and ambition amount primarily to ...