Did you hear the one about Bruce Jenner? No? You missed it? Well, then, it’s probably too late. A grown man says he’s a woman, shaves off his Adam’s apple (for starters), and shows a former network anchor his little black dress. You’d think the late-night comedians would have enough material to get them through...
For a news professional, it is hard to say which is more discouraging: that Rolling Stone published an imaginary tale of gang rape from a crazy college girl without double-checking her story, or that no one at Rolling Stone was fired after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a report that revealed top-to-bottom...
In the cathedrals of New York and Rome There is a feeling that you should just go home And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is People understand catastrophes. The everyday ebb and flow of history, in their own lives and in the world, is much harder for them to grasp. That thought—hardly...
They came in the early eighth century across the Straits of Gibraltar, unleashing terror and carnage across Iberia “like a desolating storm.” They were stopped deep inside today’s France, at Tours, by Charles Martel in 732. They kept attacking Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but their next sustained assault was at her vulnerable southeastern flank,...
Talk about the failure of fundamental journalism! In any other profession—medical, legal, financial—the guilty party would be struck off. In journalism, the guilty party—as in Rolling Stone—continues on its merry way of disinformation and downright fabrication. Some Duke University lacrosse players must be nodding their heads, as in we’ve seen it all before. Let’s start...
George Garrett used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine. The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor—which bordered on the wicked—he...
Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov once wrote that state power, or vlast, and not law “holds a sacred status in Russia.” Russians, according to Pastukhov, experience state power as a “mystical entity,” a “life giving substance,” a “deity” in its own right, from whom, in times of trouble, the narod (the people) expects answers. Anna...
“How shall we sing the Lord’s songin a strange land?” —Psalm 137:4 “[Man] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,...
Clyde Wilson’s View in the April issue (“Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions”) was excellent. A New England “Yankee” (my great-grandfather was captured and put in Libby Prison during the war) and a Bunyanesque Calvinist at that (I might as well completely alienate myself from your editorial staff while I’m at it), I attended school in...
The two takes on American Sniper in the April issue (Wayne Allensworth’s “An American Tragedy,” Correspondence; George McCartney’s “Hopalong Rides the Iraqi Range,” In the Dark) were both great reads . . . but allow for a little Dr. Lecteresque correction: “No no no, Dr. McCartney, you were doing fine. You had established trust with...
Agents of the Department of Justice wasted little time launching a civil-rights investigation into the death of Freddie Gray. In a press release, Attorney General Loretta Lynch explained that “Department officials heard from residents about concerns regarding the Baltimore Police Department and the lack of trust they feel exists between the police and the community.”...
A growing nationwide disdain for police officers has resulted from several highly publicized shootings of “unarmed” minority men who have resisted arrest or attacked officers. The media’s rhetoric has inflamed passions, resulting in the murders of two New York policemen seated in their cars, and the assassination of four Lakewood, Washington, officers eating in a...
Writers incline to solipsism, and I’m no exception. To write is to presume that your words matter to others, and this places you at the center of the universe you’re describing, with its sun, its Earth—to say nothing of the small potatoes of associated planets—revolving around your person. Thus the Copernican in me ever wrestles...
Michel Houellebecq is one of France’s best regarded novelists, nonfiction writers, and essayists. His latest novel, Soumission (Submission), appearing some months after the publication of Éric Zemmour’s Le suicide français, in the same month as the murders at Charlie Hebdo, and following a series of killings of Jews by Muslims in several French cities and...
The message on the downtown wall was brief, and the writer got straight to the point. “Whitey,” it read, “Get out! Your [sic] stupid f–ken [sic] prejudice [sic]! Hit Eight Mile Road!” After a couple of crude but potent illustrative doodles, it was signed, “Mad and Dangerous.” If you were looking for the authentic voice...
Everybody knows that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812. But in 1861 Francis Key Howard wrote about his grandfather, “The flag which he then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over...
Effie Gray Produced by Sovereign Films Directed by Richard Laxton Screenplay by Emma Thompson Distributed by Adopt Films The only reason for making a movie centered on Euphemia Gray (Dakota Fanning) is sex. Or, rather its absence. This story of Effie, the first and only wife of the magisterially influential Victorian art critic and theorist...
Two weeks before Apple began selling its new Apple Watch, Shinola Detroit took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Above a large photo of its analog watch, The Runwell, was the tag, “The Watch That’s Too Smart to Try and Be a Phone.” The Runwell starts at $550, the same price as...
Blessed is the soul who, early in life, is gifted with a passionate interest in some art, craft, sport, pastime, or field of knowledge. The object of passion might be well-nigh anything at all, so long of course as it is not vicious: stamp collecting or field hockey, cabinetry or the Civil War, boxing or...
It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. . . . Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood...
The waitress at my favorite Japanese restaurant, a spotlessly clean little joint in a Sonoma County hamlet not far from my home, had no idea what she was getting into as she took the order. Two unremarkable looking customers had walked in the door: one an older, rather prissy-looking man with wire-rim glasses, and the...
