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...
Category: Columns
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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People of the Book
Sometimes one opens the morning newspaper and, instead of fires, floods, or declarations of war, finds a parable. This one hit me with the force of a subway train back in January, and I duly rushed it off as a post on the Chronicles blog, but stubbornly the retina refused to let go of the...
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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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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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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...
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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 Different Drum
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the south at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than ten percent.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your...
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Unquantifiable Differences
The biggest mystery and conundrum of our time is not whether Stalin died a natural death, or why the CIA had Kennedy killed, but the difference between the types of individual that rise socially in the West and, respectively, in Russia or China. In the 1980’s my father wrote extensively of the problem of the...
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Putin’s Uneasy Balancing Act
“Putin, the master of the game, controls all the pieces on the chessboard and carefully divides up the areas of power,” writes influential French columnist Christine Ockrent in her most recent book, Les Oligarques. Her view is shared by most Western analysts and media commentators, regardless of their position on the person and policies of...
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Groovy Solipsism
Inherent Vice Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon Birdman Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed and written by Alejandro González Iñárritu Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures You never know what you’ll learn at the movies. Watching the two films under review this...
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Up From Sharpton
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
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Aliens and Strangers
“Pope Francis: Caring for the Poor Doesn’t Make You a Communist,” screamed the headline the day before Halloween. Perhaps not, I thought when I read the story, but why is it that caring for the world’s poor always seems to involve massive national and international programs of wealth transfer that might have been copied directly...
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Rudderless at the Pentagon
Chuck Hagel’s abrupt departure from the Pentagon on November 24 became inevitable after weeks of disagreement with the White House over strategy against the Islamic State (IS). The split had become public a month earlier, when Hagel’s blunt two-page memorandum on Middle East policy was leaked to the press. Addressed to national security advisor Susan...
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A Helluva Good Universe Next Door
Interstellar Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Nightcrawler Produced by Bold Films Written and directed by Dan Gilroy Distributed by Open Road Films In their latest film, Interstellar, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan have tried to revive a tired science-fiction premise about the world’s...
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Stomaching ISIS
I was not surprised that Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late to have ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat—unlike neocons, that is, who demand bloody...
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Dante’s Path to Heaven
Dante Alighieri died here in Ravenna, a little city where any sane man or woman might well choose to live and die. Like most people, I come here from time to time to stare stupidly at the Roman and Byzantine mosaics—though as the years go by I notice most people are letting their cameras and...
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The Christmas War 1914
This past year, we have heard a great deal about the centennial of the outbreak of World War I. Throughout that commemoration, though, we have rarely paid due attention to the religious language of Holy War and crusade deployed by all combatants. Think, for instance, of the great historic moment that many will remember this...
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The Skull Beneath the Skin
Gone Girl Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed by David Fincher Screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox If only James Thurber were still with us. I’d love to hear him address Gone Girl, both Gillian Flynn’s novel and David Fincher’s film adaptation thereof. Why? Because the story trades on...
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Ernie Nevers
George Nevers and Mary McKenna were married in 1881 in New Brunswick, Canada. He was from an old Sunbury County family, but her parents were immigrants to neighboring York County from Ireland. The Neverses would have eight children. The first two were born in Canada, and the rest in either Minnesota or Wisconsin after the...
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Arabs at the Opera
Opera has been in the news lately—in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn’t mean things are culturally looking up—to the contrary, I’m afraid. Let’s start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs), waiting for the day they can sweep away...
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Political Poltergeists
“They’re back,” cries the little girl in the movie, when the demons from Hell reappear on her television screen. The phrase, a cliché in the cliché-driven headlines of the Washington Post and Time, comes to mind at the beginning of every election cycle, as gibberish-driveling demons like Hillary and Joe, Sarah and Newt get interviewed...
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Soul Searching
Russians have bragged to themselves about their souls for ages, but for the past hundred years or so—roughly since Nietzsche discovered Dostoyevsky, Henry James discovered Turgenev, and the assorted Bloomsbury folk discovered Chekhov—other European nations, Britain foremost, have been pitching in as well. The dubious outcome of it all is that, alongside bast shoes, pinewood...
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Another Unwinnable War
Two months after the beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and one month after President Obama announced his strategy for fighting the group, the area under jihadist control continues to expand. In the east, IS forces have advanced to the outskirts of Baghdad and may soon be able...
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Vocation
Calvary Produced by Reprisal Films and The Irish Film Board Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce has the father of his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, bitterly complain of the Irish people, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden...
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The NFL, Clean and Low
The latest brouhaha about professional football players beating up their little wimmen has me shocked, shocked! that such a thing could take place in modern-day America, Home of the Depraved. But before I go on about why black football multimillionaires don’t get enough violence on the playing field but have to bring it home with...
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Rebuilding the Family Castle
A police officer stops two black teenagers sashaying down the middle of a public street. According to law enforcement and at least one noninvolved witness, one of the two—a six-foot four-inch, 300-pound behemoth—charges the cop and goes for his gun. Fighting for his life, the policeman shoots and kills the “gentle giant,” who, as it...
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Staying Out of Another War
In the final days of August the stage seemed set for a major escalation of America’s air war against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL). The operation, which started with limited tactical strikes between Mosul and Erbil—initially to save stranded refugees, then to help the Kurds defend their capital—was about to...
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Between the Idea and the Reality
A Most Wanted Man Produced by The Ink Factory and Film 4 Directed by Anton Corbijn Screenplay by Andrew Bovell from John Le Carre’s novel Distributed by Roadside Attractions John Le Carre has made a career of demonstrating that intelligence agencies are fundamentally untrustworthy. The very nature of their work, he suggests, makes them prone...