I’ve been wading through Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a book about Soviet Russia and its crimes and betrayals. The reason I’m reading that particular book is that one of Amis’s goals in writing it … Continue reading →
I’ve posted this song before, but I think it bears repeating, especially on Memorial Day. It’s Tim McGraw’s extraordinarily moving song “If You’re Reading This:” If you’re readin’ this My momma’s sittin’ there Looks like I only got a one … Continue reading →
That is, Daughters. Obama’s slip of the tongue—saying “my sons” when he has daughters—seems very odd indeed. Does he have sons we don’t know about? Or perhaps he always wanted sons, and this is in the nature of a Freudian … Continue reading →
…shows em how it’s done:
Continue reading →In yesterday’s thread about the undeserving poor, commenter IGotBupkis took aim at the musical “My Fair Lady” versus the movie version of the play “Pygmalion.” His comment was rather long (go here to read the whole thing), but I’ll excerpt … Continue reading →
…seems to be going the way of most glorious revolutions—not well (although I suppose it depends who’s doing the judging). It’s fifty-fifty between the Muslim Brotherhood and a Mubarak surrogate in the first round of voting: In what many described … Continue reading →
An exchange in the comments section of this post made me think of one of my favorite scenes from “My Fair Lady.” It’s a discourse on the welfare system by Eliza’s ne-er-do-well father, Alfred Doolittle: Here it is: And here’s … Continue reading →
This Politico piece about how Obama’s campaign has been flatfooted and awkward contains the following rather amusing observation: Some key Democrats say they have been dismayed watching Obama become a divider not a uniter, trying to incite anger among women, … Continue reading →
So all right already—Obama was a stoner in high school. Didn’t we already know that? And although the photos are rather interesting in a retro-70s way, do we really care? Not all that much, although it certainly tells us some … Continue reading →
Perhaps you’ve never seen Suzanne Farrell dance. Perhaps you’ve never even heard of her. She’s sixty-six now and retired from performing for over twenty years. But in her heyday she was unique, and choreographer George Balanchine was besotted with her. … Continue reading →
I wonder what Obama meant by this—other than just a new way to attack Romney: There was a woman in Iowa who shared her story of financial struggles, and he gave her an answer right out of an economic textbook. … Continue reading →
Author Paul Fussell has died at 88. I read only two things he wrote, but both of them were extraordinary. The first was his magnum opus, the one that made him famous (at least in some circles), The Great War … Continue reading →