Born in 1905 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Joseph Timothy O’Callahan was reared in a devout Irish Catholic family. He took to learning with a passion and earned his bachelor’s degree by the time he was 20, and his doctorate at the age of 24. Shortly afterward, he joined the faculty of the physics department at Boston...
An American friend who is very well connected in Washington, D.C., was telling me he’s worried about Europe. “So what else is new?” I said. “No, I really mean it. Future generations could grow up under Islamic rule.” It was a John McEnroe moment, as in You can’t be serious. He assured me he was. ...
And the people in the houses All went to the university Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same . . . In “Little Boxes” Malvina Reynolds was protesting against the conformity of the 1950’s, when core requirements and a limited number of majors still ensured some measure of common...
My Sicilian friend Manlio has something in him of the late Curtis Cate, who was a mutual friend of mine and Tom Fleming’s and a frequent contributor to these pages. When Curtis died in 2006 aged 82, I did not think to write an obituary. For some reason, one whose perennial argument with the heart...
The mystery of brightness is more profound than the mystery of darkness, and that of stillness perhaps the most profound of all. In the noontime glare the heart of the Gila wilderness in southwestern New Mexico is both bright and still, the sole sound the drone of a circling horsefly, the only breath the imperceptible...
I may be stereotyping Chronicles readers unfairly, but I suspect that not many read witches&pagans. If your subscription has lapsed, I draw your attention to a recent feature that actually has far-reaching consequences for more mainstream believers of all kinds. In an interview, well-known pagan author Diana L. Paxson complained that The generation that founded...
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Produced by Chernin Entertainment Directed by Matt Reeves Screenplay by Mark Bomback and Rick Jaffa Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Snowpiercer Produced by Opus Pictures Directed by Bong Joon-ho Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson Distributed by The Weinstein Company As titles go, Dawn of...
Boo to the CIA! It got caught spying on Germany, and its top man in Berlin has been sent home. What I’d like to know is what’s so important about Berlin’s open-book policies that we had to play dirty? Maybe our ex-top man in the German capital should now concentrate on weeding out Israeli spies...
This is our annual summer vacation issue, which means I am free to ramble on like an old lizard soaking up gin and sunshine at the beach and telling stories that all begin, “Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ” Did I ever tell you about the time I first...
When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on Germany. A Russian...
The Great War started 100 years ago this August. The most tragic event in human history, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A prosperous and well-ordered world was shattered forever. New killing machines that only a generation earlier did not exist were deployed on a massive scale: airplanes, tanks, poison gases, submarines. The...
Ida Produced by Canal + Polska Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski Screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz Distributed by Music Box Films The personal is the political: This 1960’s catchphrase defiantly bandied by leftists and feminists has always seemed to me childishly peevish. It’s as if, in a fit of collective pique, those on the...
Five years ago, the California state legislature voted to apologize to the Chinese for former laws that discriminated against them, including the federal government’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which California congressmen championed. The apology bill was sponsored by state assembly members Paul Fong and Kevin de León. Fong said he was not planning on...
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
A few months ago I found myself stranded in Piccadilly. There was a parade of women—of a decidedly Sapphic cast, I thought—carrying placards with slogans that admonished men for their proclivity to rape, violence, and pillage. Most prominent was a sign that read “No Means No,” its message being, supposedly, that when a woman refuses...
“This is the biggest contract in the history of the gas sector of the former USSR,” Vladimir Putin said after the $400 billion agreement to supply Russian natural gas to China was signed in Shanghai on May 21. It is much more than that, Putin went on: It is an “epochal event.” China’s President Xi...
Blue Ruin Produced by The Lab of Madness Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier Distributed by RADiUS-TWC Hateship Loveship Produced by The Film Community Directed by Liza Johnson Written by Mark Poirier from Alice Munro’s story Distributed by IFC Films Revenge, we’re told, is a dish best served cold. But is this true? Director Jeremy...
I write this while American unmanned flights and 18 American “specialists” are looking for those 200 unfortunate girls abducted by Boko Haram, a group our very own Hillary Clinton had refused to place on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. Boko Haram is as bad as it gets and as violent as can be, but...
“‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said The Lady of Shalott.” “We’ve turned into a nation of TV watchers, video-game players, and virtual sex addicts,” observed the cheerful old cynic. “How is that so different,” asked the resentful 30-something adolescent, “from earlier generations that spent all their time reading poetry and fiction or going to...
“All may have if they dare try a glorious life or grave.” I saw those words—George Herbert’s, as it turned out—incised into the stonework of a church near Waterloo Station. There was a little churchyard nearby, it was a warm spring afternoon, and I think I must have read those words over a thousand times. ...
There are people who think the classics are a dated luxury. Anyone who believes that should stay far away from the Christian Bible. It’s been many years since I was able to read the New Testament in English. Now, don’t think I’m showing off there. My Greek is not wonderful, and I find a parallel...
To a casual observer it might seem that President Barack Obama’s four-nation tour of East Asia, which took him to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines, came at a time of America’s undisputed global predominance. The visit strengthened existing U.S. military commitments to the region, created some new ones, irritated China, and emboldened American...
Noah Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky The Unknown Known Produced by The Weinstein Company, History Films, and Moxie Pictures Written and directed by Errol Morris Distributed by RADIUS-TWC In Darren Aronofsky’s telling of the Noah story, Cain’s descendant Tubalcain (Ray Winstone) confronts his creator, growling these words: “I...
It seems that Benghazi is remembered today only for the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission there. In the 1940’s and 50’s, though, it was known for launching the planes that conducted Operation Tidal Wave, a brilliant example of the heroism of American airmen, and an equally brilliant example of Murphy’s Law. The former...
I never listen to pop music, but I do know the difference between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I even know one of the Stones’ daughters, Theodora Richards, as she went out with the son of a friend who brought her aboard my boat. (Incredibly, she had very good manners.) Pink Floyd—it’s a band—I...
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. “Robbing, slaughtering, pillaging they misname sovereign authority, and where they make an empty waste they call it peace.” Tacitus puts this accurate if one-sided summation of Roman imperial strategy into the mouth of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain, urging the Celtic warriors to resist...
Spending the first three days of spring in snowy Moscow, especially after being in balmy Yalta and Sevastopol, is not my idea of fun. It is useful, however, when you write on foreign affairs and there’s a first-rate crisis under way between “Putin’s Russia” and the West. The overriding impression is that Moscow no longer...
The Grand Budapest Hotel Produced by Scott Rudin Productions and Studio Babelsberg Directed and written by Wes Anderson Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Exceptionally well-made pastries are often said to be lighter than air. I was reminded of this after watching Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a confection so airy that...
One of the great knee-slappers, however perverse, of the so-called War on Terror is the fact that fundamentalist Islamic forces are stronger than ever as a result. It is like going on a crash diet for a month and putting on 20 pounds. In the 12 years since George W. first uttered those three little...
Despite all the media attention devoted to it, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine poses no threat to the United States. Soviet Russia was a mortal threat to the United States because she embodied a communist ideology with aspirations of global hegemony. The threat died with that ideology, which is why Americans who believe that the goal...
The United States is a nation of debtors. Whatever sources you consult or trust, our per capita debt is extraordinarily high. The money geeks at NerdWallet.com, after analyzing statistics from the Federal Reserve, offer the following profile of American households: Average credit-card debt: $15,270 Average mortgage debt: $149,925 Average student-loan debt: $32,258 I shall not...
As readers of this column may have noted, I hardly ever comment on events in Moscow. Since 1984, when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in Russia, I have taken the view that the clever understand what transpires there without need for fresh explanations, while the daft, no matter how ingenious one’s explanations or persuasive one’s reasoning,...
In April 1904, Scottish geographer Halford Mackinder gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. His paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” caused a sensation and marked the birth of geopolitics as an autonomous discipline. According to Mackinder, control over the Eurasian “World-Island” is the key to global hegemony. At its core is the “pivot...
Now that Matthew McConaughey has won his loudly preordained Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, it’s time we asked how he did it. The answer is simple. He pulled off a canny trifecta: First, he made himself an LGBT wet dream by playing a heterosexual who gets AIDS; second,...
Most Americans have no idea that California was once an independent republic and came into the Union, like Texas, without going through a territorial stage. This is symbolized by California’s state seal, which features Minerva, who sprang from Jupiter’s head fully formed. During the 1950’s we Golden State schoolchildren were taught all about our Bear...
One of life’s safest bets is that, following a visit by a Japanese premier to the shrine that honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese megacrooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion over here will echo them. ...
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
The American billionaire Elon Musk, lately much in the news on account of his ambition to send apple pie, solar energy, PayPal, and Ninja Turtles to other planets in our galaxy, was once a cash-strapped college student. The experience, as he boasted to the Los Angeles Times, had taught him frugality: “I tried various experiments...
The noun geopolitics and the adjective geopolitical are increasingly present in media discourse on world affairs. In principle, this is a good thing. Relating political power to the immutable imperatives of space and resources is essential to an analysis of world affairs that is free from the ideological baggage of American exceptionalism, whether Wilsonian or...
Her Produced by Annapurna Pictures Written and directed by Spike Jonze Distributed by Warner Brothers Inside Llewyn Davis Produced by StudioCanal and Anton Capital Entertainment Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by CBS Films Her is directed by Spike Jonze, the inscrutable nom de cinema Adam Spiegel has adopted for himself. Set...
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
Every year, the Christian calendar is more and more marginalized by anti-Christian “holidays” and commemorations. In 2013, the first week of Advent, by decree of President Obama and National Public Radio, was displaced by Nelson Mandela Week. Since we were only in December, I could not wait to see what our masters will pull out...
Inutile asking me why this column is called that, or what a buffalo harp might be. I honestly do not know, except that it is the name of an old ironmonger’s near my house. One still happens here and there, in the less progressive European towns, upon those ancient shop signs, faded black or gold...
Stand by for a barrage of centennials. For some years to come, we will be facing very regular commemorations of the various horrors of World War I and its aftermath, so expect a great many books, documentaries, and newspaper pieces on Sarajevo, the Armenian massacres, the Lusitania, the Russian Revolution, and on through the 2020’s. ...
Uit die blou van onse hemel uit die diepte van ons see, Oor ons ewige gebergtes, waar die kranse antwoord gee. When in 1918 Cornelis Jacobus Langenhoven wrote “Die Stem” (“The Voice”), the poem that became South Africa’s pre-1995 national anthem, by “our everlasting mountains” he meant the Drakensberg range that separates Transvaal from Natal. ...
Nebraska Produced by Blue Lake Media Fund and Bona Fide ProductionsDirected by Alexander Payne Screenplay by Bob Nelson Distributed by Paramount Vantage American Hustle Produced by Atlas Entertainment and Annapurna Pictures Directed and written by David O. Russell Distributed by Columbia Pictures Few directors would have taken the chances Alexander Payne does with his...
It’s popular in academe today to describe the Mexican War as an example of an aggressive and expansive colossus beating up on a weak neighbor, but that was not the case in 1846. The war was really a second phase of the Texas Revolution. Most people don’t understand that Mexico never recognized Texas independence. It...
One of the great but perverse pleasures of my life when I’m in New York City is to read the New York Times. It’s perverse because no paper north of Saudi Arabia lies quite as blatantly as the Times does, its lying based on omission rather than invention, and by the use of the kind...