Actor Michael Landon, born Oygenglayben Schmuelowitz (memo to self: Confirm that before press time), was the handsome star of Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie (I just lost ...
When I was a child, there was a persistent playground rumor that the letters “BMW” in the German car manufacturer’s brand name secretly stood for “Black Man’s Willy,” ...
One of the frustrations of writing a weekly column is that sometimes you wrap a piece, post it, and that very day the Special Olympians of public discourse provide fodder you wish ...
In these willfully ignorant times, the powers that be seem, in their haste to be politically correct, to forget that America fought its bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost ...
This week I revisit a favorite theme: how poor interpretation leads to poor strategy. Like when rightists attribute the entire tranny phenomenon to “grooming,” an ...
A government of the people, in Lincoln’s phrase, has changed by degrees into a people of the government. When one considers the number of duties or obligations one must fulfill ...
One of the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the legalization—dare I say, the institutionalization?—of corruption. This is not a matter of money passing ...
My taste in films is strange, at least in the statistical sense. I don’t like romance, I don’t like happy endings (they depress me), and I don’t like gratuitous or ...
There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not ...
The Russian writer V.G. Korolenko (a kind of sub-Chekhov) once wrote that Man is made for happiness as a bird for flight: To which I can only say that this has not been my ...
We live in an age of serial expertise. First we were experts in climate change, whether or not we believed it was taking place, and consequently in energy policy. Then, with ...
I don’t care for kids; that’s why I never had any. That said, in my early 30s I did have one brief episode of dealing with children. I dated a Dominican woman who had an ...
Last week was a good one, so it’s kind of dickish to make fun, but it’s really amusing how quickly some of you went from, in 2016, “We’re gonna get tired of winning,” to ...
“No worst, there is none,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, about human states of mind. If he were alive today, he might write, “No most absurd, there is none,” about ...
According to a recent survey, more than half of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Britain report having been consulted by young patients distressed about climate change and ...
“Sometimes, doctor,” a patient of mine once said to me, “I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dyke, crying wolf.” That is a pretty good summary of how I feel ...