Pope Francis is wrong to change the Catechism of the Catholic Church to suit his postmodern, antibiblical leanings, making capital punishment utterly “inadmissible” in civil society, like hearsay evidence in court. Pegging his new teaching on the “inviolability and dignity of the person,” he has offended decent people by blaspheming against the Bible, calling evil...
The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.” Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, the Senate’s modern-day firebrand who never tires in her perpetual imitation of the maniacal abolitionist John Brown,...
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
Heralding the rise of the daily newspaper in 1831, French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine declared journalism would emerge as “the whole of human thought,” but that thought itself “will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book.” The book, Lamartine proclaimed, “will arrive too late.” “The only book...
When historians survey Europe’s 20th century, rarely do they question the fundamental evil of the old irrelevant monarchies and aristocratic regimes, and the obvious necessity of replacing them with progressive socialist and nationalist substitutes. A strong case can in fact be made that those ancien regime states disappeared some decades too early, and that had...
Londonistan: The content is in the book’s title. Melanie Phillips, the author, had great difficulty in finding a publisher; no main house would take it, even though she is a distinguished and successful writer, and in the end it came out in 2006 with a minor publisher, Gibson Square. The book’s theme is that Britain...
President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The...
Here’s a question for you: Could the “monster” of the #MeToo movement get a fair trial anywhere in these United States? Is there a potential jury member that has not made up his mind that Harvey Weinstein raped, mistreated, and oppressed women? Since last October to be exact, every news organization in America has been...
Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson. “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...
The very idea of dual citizenship is downright absurd. It’s a contradiction that cannot be resolved. The concept of citizenship is based on the expectation of loyalty to the country, and this, in turn, means that citizens owe their exclusive allegiance to the community in which they live. So how is it possible to have...
If ever there was a democratic election in a giant modern nation-state, it was Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2016. And I’ve closely watched every presidential election since I was nine in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson lied his way to a landslide against Barry Goldwater. Trump gathered the remnants of Nixon’s Silent Majority and the...
I have been told that there is something called the “Pavarotti Effect,” and that this phenomenon is observable and definable. Perhaps sometimes the Pavarotti Effect was an affect, or perhaps it was subsumed by the “Superstar Effect,” as Sherwin Rosen called it in a paper published in The American Economic Review in 1981. Rosen insisted...
My wife and I shall visit Paris again this fall, as we have done for years, but the city will be an empty place for us following the death of our dear friend and my revered colleague, Claude Polin, on July 23. Mercifully, Claude was spared the horrors of modern death in a nursing home...
The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its politics. The secessionist spirit is spreading on the left and in leftist portions of the...
A book faces me across the room from a bookcase in my office. It has a blood-red and black cover. The author’s name is printed in black down the upper part of the spine and the title in white below that. The title is Io Uccido—“I Kill” in Italian. I’ve meant for some time to...
It’s easy in this business to read too much journalism at the expense of books. Every morning I go through the New York Times (faster and more selectively with each week that passes), the (London) Daily Telegraph, and Le Figaro (it has some strong conservative writers, like Luc Ferry, and interesting essays and well-done interviews...
In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government. In 1945 he was tried and found guilty of treason for his collaboration with the German occupation. Between those two years, Hitler built his strong war machine, and in 1940 he invaded...
Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk. Such is surely the case with P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Reginald...
Many a new genre of journalism has sprung up thanks to President Trump. The latest is the “victims of tariffs” industry profile. As the Trump administration slaps tariffs on foreign steel, aluminum, and manufactured goods of various kinds, trading partners—i.e., rivals—such as China and Mexico are imposing retaliatory tariffs of their own. The problem for...
The first problem with Brexit is the word Brexit—one of those stupid portmanteau words, like motel or brunch. It is a joined-up abbreviation of “Britain’s” and “exit from the European Union.” Conceived in a think tank, by someone who wanted to remain in the E.U., the term should have been murdered at birth. Instead, like...
You Were Never Really Here Produced by Why Not Productions and the British Film Institute Directed and written by Lynne Ramsay, based on Jonathan Ames’s novel Distributed by Amazon Studios Tully Produced by BRON Studios Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody Distributed by Focus Features This month we have two—you’ll excuse the expression—art-house...
