NEW YORK—Election-night fever is heating up, and I hope the party I’m giving on the evening of Nov. 3 will not end in fisticuffs. All my guests except one are Trump haters, so my dinner looks...
GSTAAD—The staff is back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The gardener and the cleaner are Portuguese, and they greet me with their inherent dignity from afar. The...
Midway is a surprisingly accurate and competent WWII movie about the most thrilling naval battle in American history. While only 38 percent of film critics gave the film a thumbs-up, 92 percent of its...
GSTAAD—I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: The memoirs of Barbara Black, the wife of my good friend Lord Black, simply do not make sense where certain people she writes about...
In a heartening sign, a number of counties in Pennsylvania have chosen to defy Gov. Tom Wolf’s shutdown order. The Beaver County Board of Commissioners announced on May 8 that the District Attorney...
Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Lydgate, Edward Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda are excellent examples of well-rounded and believable male literary inventions with a variety of qualities...
(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.) The great tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano was once asked by a journalist: “Maestro, why do you smoke so many cigars?” To this impertinence...
The front page of the New York Post on the 20th of April, 2020, said it all: a large crowd in front of a Brooklyn barbershop being dispersed by police after a riotous party. There was no social distancing,...
Is Joe Biden forfeiting the law-and-order issue to Donald Trump? So it would seem. “Republicans Use Law and Order As Rallying Cry” was the top headline on The New York Times‘ front-page...
GSTAAD—The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to go, after a wasted year that did wonders for my health, the diet is about to...
Before I finally watched Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s colossally popular Broadway musical depicting the Founding Fathers as rapping Men of Color, I had never heard that it’s so childish....
Joker is a clever and memorable (although not terribly original or enjoyable) R-rated art-house drama in the tradition of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy masquerading as yet another comic book movie....
The best movie comedies of the 1930s were largely written by former newspaper reporters who had also tried their hand at writing for the New York stage before being seduced by Hollywood’s sunshine...
There is no better demonstration of The Matrix’s concept of the blue pill that leaves its victims able to perceive only the simulacrum of reality curated by the powers-that-be than that virtually every...
After Pearl Harbor, FDR declared that his role of “Dr. New Deal” had been superseded, replaced by his new role, “Dr. Win the War.” Tuesday, President Donald Trump signaled that,...
PHOENIXVILLE, Pa.—Let’s look on the bright side of the new 20-hour nonstop flight between New York and Sydney. Personally I don’t expect to ever be that desperate to get to Sydney. I’m...
Apple pie, farms, local movie theaters, pickup baseball games, swimming holes, volunteer firemen, and small libraries with very old lady librarians: an America soon to be gone with the wind. I just read...
Tiberius, the Roman emperor of darkest fame, retired to the island of Capri. In the month of the heat wave, when the Dog constellation is at its zenith and Sirius shines brightly, the emperor ordered a...
For many years now, we’ve gotten mountains of press about “The Talk,” the rite of passage lecture that black parents feel obliged to give their sons so that they won’t end up getting...
Martin Scorsese is trending on Twitter for denouncing superhero movies as being more like theme parks than films because “Cinema is an art form that brings you the unexpected.” And yet the...
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