…on the eve of the sort-of millennium makes for some fascinating reading in retrospect. I call it the “sort-of” millennium because it took place in late December of 1999, whereas the real millennium would have begun with the year 2001. … Continue reading →
…but this announcement makes me very, very sad. Ah, but who believes the government, anyway? Today it’s “no mermaids,” but tomorrow they’ll say there are no unicorns, and that the space alien autopsy videos are bogus. The nerve! When I … Continue reading →
The news that Nora Ephron has died at 71 took me by surprise. I had no idea she was even ill, but it was more than that—she was just so funny (which is a stupid thing to say, I know, … Continue reading →
Steyn writes: In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered … Continue reading →
You’re probably familiar with Alice Walker’s Pulitizer prizewinning novel The Color Purple. It caused a sensation when it was published way back in 1982, with its story of a poor black woman who rises from a history of abuse and … Continue reading →
About a week ago marked the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of Juliet Poyntz. She’s hardly a household word, but her story is not atypical of those highly-placed Communists who turned on their former colleagues. Poyntz was a Barnard history … Continue reading →
…is gone: [Bradbury] attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college–instead, he read and wrote voraciously. “When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week,” he said … 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 →
What do you get when you cross the TV show “Survivor” with the Roman Colosseum, “The Lottery,” dystopian sci-fi, Lord of the Flies, “The Most Dangerous Game,” and “The Wizard of Oz,” and then pitch it to the audience for … Continue reading →
Here’s a poignant photo of a man named Greg Cook hugging his dog Coco after his East Limestone, Alabama home was destroyed by a recent tornado and Coco was found inside the ruins: It’s one of many photos in this … Continue reading →
I have a weakness for books. If I freely indulged myself, I’d be poverty-stricken in no time flat. I’ve got such long lists of books to read that if I were to actually to get to all of them it … Continue reading →
When I hear a song or read a poem, other songs and poems often spring unbidden into my mind. They have some relation to the first, as a sort of harmonic vibration or echo. Sonnets are a particular form of … Continue reading →