I’ve just finished my latest book group assignment, Waiting For Snow in Havana, a memoir by Carlos Eire about his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, the Castro takeover, and the circumstances under which he was able to leave Cuba for the … Continue reading →
I am getting really, really, really sick of this sort of excuse/explanation: “The problem [of plagiarism] is as old as journalism,” says Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Media Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s a systemic issue, … Continue reading →
Five guys at the lake decide to recreate a photograph of themselves over and over, showing the passage of time [hat tip: Althouse].
Continue reading →I don’t ordinarily read the Chicago Tribune, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of John Kass before, but this is one heckuva good column. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but I’ll just suggest you read it. In … Continue reading →
…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 →