The political story this year was supposed to be a familiar one: A member of the Bush family was going to begin a successful march to the Republican nomination, and a member of the Clinton family was going to do the same thing on the Democratic side. Through June 30, Jeb Bush had raised $114.1...
Category: Columns
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How Long Has This Been Going On?
We live in revolutionary times of rapid technological change, and yes, it is a little disconcerting when the rules morph and the practices mutate. But I did predict years ago that vinyl would be back, and so it is. This year’s junque is next year’s antique. And I remember back even to Before Vinyl. A...
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The Curtain Descends; Everything Ends
Phoenix Produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber and Bayerische Rundfunk Directed and written by Christian Petzold Distributed by Sundance Selects The Gift Produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Blumhouse Productions Directed and written by Joel Edgerton Distributed by STX Entertainment and Showtime Networks German director Christian Petzold’s new film, Phoenix, begins with a perfectly dark...
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Europe’s Ongoing Demise
“The Third Muslim Invasion of Europe is entering its mature stage by sea,” I observed in these pages in June, as thousands of Middle Eastern and African illegal immigrants sailed from Libya to Italy day after day. In the intervening four months, in a dramatic development, a new southeastern land route was stormed by a...
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Browning Europe
With every passing day, Europe is turning browner and browner, the Old Continent being overrun by a tide of humanity not seen since the upheavals following World War II. Just think about it: 3,000 migrants from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Niger, and Eritrea pass daily through the Balkans on their way to Germany, France, Austria, and...
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A Perversion of History
If you think the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the grounds of the South Carolina capitol was the end of flag controversy, you may be surprised to learn that an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times declared, “It’s time California dump” the Bear Flag, “a symbol of blatant illegality and racial prejudice. ...
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Sophistory
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
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Doing Music Wrong
National Public Radio is a bad idea, as you can tell from the name. But the specific reality is even worse, though I suppose it comes in different forms. The service is varied in that local stations can tailor themselves differently. But I believe that my take on NPR is basically true about the “NPR...
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Conquering History
I recently obtained a copy of a British newspaper published in 2025, which discussed the country’s favorite television program in that year. The reviewer gives a crisp summary of the latest incarnation of Downton Abbey, and the episode in question is a crowd-pleaser. Everything is bustling in the historic English mansion in 1925, as butlers,...
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A Boring Brexit
London: It should feel like a good time for Britain to leave the European Union. The euro crisis continues to tear the Continent apart. The charming-yet-feckless Greeks must soon be on their way out, in spite of the latest bailout-for-austerity swap between the European Central Bank and Athens. Germany, so long the driving force behind...
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Detecting the Personal Beyond
Mr. Holmes Produced by BBC Films and See-Saw Films Directed by Bill Condon Screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher from Mitch Cullin’s novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind Distributed by The Weinstein Company Mr. Holmes is the film adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s curious 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. Reading the novel, I was...
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The Iran Deal in Context
On July 14, in Vienna, the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany, and the European Union signed a 109-page Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The Islamic republic has accepted a comprehensive set of international, legally mandated, and (by implication) militarily enforceable safeguards that “will ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively...
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Alien Report
The newspaper that prints only what fits its piously fraudulent agenda, the New York Times, has reviewed a book by one Ta-Nehisi Coates twice, both times showering it with the sort of praise that would make a Hollywood name-dropper blush. A biweekly magazine, New York, which reports mostly on food and gay porn, put the...
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#CallMeMilton
Like most individuals my age who have both X and Y chromosomes and a conventionally male sexual organ, I was assigned a specific identity at birth. I obviously had no choice in the matter, though I can hardly blame the delivery-room doctor or my parents, since, in those benighted days, even the most enlightened members...
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Quiet, Please
Silence can be a bad thing if there is too much of it, but today that is not often the case, for we live in a noisy world. The postindustrial era promised to turn down the volume, but it didn’t—too often, we are ourselves directly responsible for a lot of noise. But not all of...
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Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Madame Bovary Produced by A Company Filmproduktions gesellschaft Screenplay by Felipe Marino and Sophie Barthes from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Directed by Sophie Barthes Distributed by Alchemy and Millennium Entertainment Gustave Flaubert was the satirist of dissatisfaction. His principal theme was the ruinous nature of unrealizable dreams, a malady he treated with cold contempt in his 1857 novel...
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Bumpy BRICS Road
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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Dying With a Kardashian
For those who like to see their name in print, the Hiltons and Kardashians of this world, make sure that, when the man in the white suit visits you, you’re the only one he’s dropping in on. In fact, even if the white-suited gent visits you within a day or two of having called upon...
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An Unhinged World
A few years after he was removed from office in 1890, Otto von Bismarck remarked that “Europe today is a powder keg, and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.” At present, the Iron Chancellor’s dictum is applicable to the entire planet. The most important event by far this year has been Europe’s...
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Competitive Advantage
It was, in Edward de Vere’s words, much ado about nothing. The media didn’t think so, called it Deflategate, and one of America’s great sporting heroes, Tom Brady, was pilloried as if he had inflated the beautiful model Gisele Bundchen, his wife, against her wishes. In case any of you Chronicles readers missed it while...
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A Fast Track to Oblivion
On April 25, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a story with the sort of headline we have come to expect in recent decades: “Goodyear chooses Mexico, not Akron.” The story went on to report that Goodyear had chosen to build a $500 million plant to make premium tires in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, even though...
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Belleau Wood
Within the Marine Corps the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood is legendary. Outside the Corps it is relatively unknown. Yet the battle was a turning point in the history of the Corps, clearly demonstrating that the Marines could operate at brigade strength in conventional warfare. Until then Marines were used principally as landing...
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Watch This Space
That I could order my Apple Watch Sport from my iPhone while walking down the Corso Italia in Milan, and pay for it on the phone with just the touch of my thumb, is as much of a technological marvel as the Watch itself. With the exception of my thumbprint, not a single element in...
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To Begin With
In response to numerous entreaties, private demand, and the obligations incurred by untold knowledge, I have reluctantly agreed to undertake this Music Column; and I will only continue to inscribe it as long as those three particular conditions remain in full force. Yet I do not conceive The Music Column to be self-preoccupied—rather, it addresses...
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Are You a Bigot?
A major function of liberal society is inventing new forms of bigotry. You take an obvious idea—something believed always, everywhere, and by all—and show that in fact it is not just false, but a vicious form of hatred and discrimination. As a current case in point, I offer transphobia, which is defined as holding antagonistic...
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Women on the Loose
Mad Max: Fury Road Produced by Village Roadshow Pictures Written and directed by George Miller Distributed by Warner Brothers Ex Machina Produced by Film 4 Written and directed by Alex Garland Distributed by Universal Pictures We never know how feminism will show up at the movies. We only know that it will. Currently, it’s on...
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Tom Fleming’s Complainte
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...
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The Third Muslim Invasion
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,...
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Code Yellow
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...
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Dig Deeper
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...
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Mnemosyne’s Tricks
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...
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A Strange Romance This Was
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...
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Trucking Upward
A Most Violent Year Produced by Before The Door Pictures and Washington Square Films Directed and written by J.C. Candor Distributed by A24 I went to J.C. Chandor’s new film A Most Violent Year with high expectations. His first, Margin Call, was simply the best cinematic examination of the 2008 banking crisis we’ve had to...
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Family Tradition
Michelle Parker, a young mother of two, disappeared from her Florida home in 2011 and has never been seen again. The only suspect in her disappearance is her husband, who has left the state with the two children. Michelle’s mother, who has not seen her grandchildren since 2011, has repeatedly petitioned the Florida legislature to...
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Israel’s House Divided
In the aftermath of Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral victory last March, the “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict is off the table for the foreseeable future. Netanyahu’s public disavowal of the two-state formula (despite his subsequent denials) was not a last-minute campaign ploy. It reflected his deeply held belief that Israel can survive and prosper by...
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Investing in the Future
“There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th-century fiction than the legacy.” So writes a female columnist in Britain’s best newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, before going on to say some rude things about trust-fund babies. According to the lady, a will stands as a symbol of the “baleful power of crabbed old age...
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An American Sniper
A galloglass was a professional warrior hired by an Irish chief. The practice of employing such men became common in the decades following the Norman invasion, when it became obvious that heavily armed and mail-clad fighters were needed to contest the battlefield. One Irish contemporary described how the Gaels of Ireland had gone into battle...
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It’s Just Business
A dozen years ago (give or take), I tried to commission a piece for Chronicles on how Big Business was increasingly pushing a leftist social and cultural agenda. For years, the conservative orthodoxy in the United States had been that capitalist institutions, from mom-and-pop shops up to the largest corporations, were essentially conservative. (In the...
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Smound No5
There is only one smell commonly found on earth that is worse than the chemical smell of rotting orange rinds. This, oddly enough, is a woman’s perfume—Chanel ?5. As it recently emerged from World War II archives that Mademoiselle Chanel was, in her spare time, Agent F-7124 of the Abwehr, the Nazis’ military intelligence, I...
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Hopalong Rides the Iraqi Range
American Sniper Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Screenplay by Jason Hall Directed by Clint Eastwood We’re told that during his later career director John Huston frequently preferred reading a good newspaper while his actors performed a scene before the camera. He believed in leaving them to their own devices, among which he trusted thespian...
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Why They Fought
The late Jean-François Revel wrote a once-famous book with the title Comment les démocraties finissent. Revel was not a stupid man, and I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon “we tired the sun with talking,” but as a political philosopher, he was a prisoner of the leftist ideology that treats terms like equality and democracy as substantial...
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A Towering Genius, Greatly Missed
On April 1, 1815, Otto Eduard Leo pold von Bismarck was born on the family estate at Schönhausen near Berlin, in what used to be Prussia. He came into this world at the end of a quarter-century of pan-European crisis, which started with the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Bismarck’s bicentennial...
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Friends With Benefits
The week after the murdering scum of ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya—their crime was being Christian—the European Commission opened an investigation of Christian schools in Britain for allegedly “discriminating” against nonreligious teachers. In other words, the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels want to force Christian schools to stop giving preference to religious staff while...
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We Came to Fight the Jihad
If a Muslim prays in a mosque and nobody sees her, does Allah still hear her prayers? That question might seem more urgent than rhetorical for a certain Bosnian immigrant after Dr. Arshad Shaikh, the president of the Muslim Association of Greater Rockford (MAGR), told the Rockford Register Star on February 9 that “It would...
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Gone With the Wind
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Appomattox. In recent times, academics studying the Civil War have reached a striking degree of consensus about how that war should be understood, and its practical implications today. Sadly, that consensus has one enormous omission. Overwhelmingly, scholars agree that the war was about the defense and preservation of...
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Seized by the Moment
Boyhood Produced and distributed by IFC Directed and written by Richard Linklater Richard Linklater’s Boyhood became the critics’ darling upon its staged release at the end of 2014. From The New Yorker to the Daily News, reviewers have vied with one another to sing its praises. Most of them think it’s a natural coming of...
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A Plague on Both Their Houses
“Layze Ameeze de tayze ameeze sont mayze ameeze.” A drunken redneck recited this at me late one night in 1965, at Andy’s Lounge. Andy’s was one of Charleston’s last “blind tigers”—a speakeasy, complete with gambling and homely B-girls, that defied even the closing laws that the other scofflaw establishments observed. I went there often to...
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The Battle for the Middle
American politicians love to pretend that they care about the middle class, because they know that the middle class generally determines who gets elected. But once elected, politicians tend to serve those who finance their campaigns, and the interests of large donors seldom align with those of middle-class Americans. This game has been played for...
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A Jihadist Victory
The claim propagated in the Western corporate media that the “March for Unity” in Paris on January 11 symbolized a victory of “freedom of speech” over “extremism” is wrong. The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, and particularly the aftermath of those attacks, were a victory for militant Islam and a fresh sign...
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Responding to Obscenities
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...