Back in the 80s I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. I opened the first page of the first book in the series without much expectation, started reading, and immediately realized I was encountering a … Continue reading →
Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club has posted the entire text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement speech, in which the then-exiled Russian warned the Western world that its time might be up soon if it didn’t get religion. That’s a … Continue reading →
It’s an ugly rumor, I know, and I shouldn’t repeat ugly rumors. But just this once, I will: Paul McCartney and his wife Heather might be splitsville (the photo accompanying that link, by the way, is proof that after a … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Today we have news that the CIA detention center leaker might not have been Mary McCarthy after all; at least, she is denying any involvement. So for now I’ll stop referring to it as the McCarthy case. But even … Continue reading →
Part of an interesting piece by Dr. Horsefeathers on the subject of Kipling, posted some time ago (ignore the spambot dump that the comments section of that post has managed to become) , is the following observation on Kipling and … Continue reading →
Rudyard Kipling’s name has come up in the comments section twice recently. The first time was in the context of this comment, in which Richard Aubrey mentions that: Kipling, in his “Kim” has a retired officer of Indian cavalry talking … Continue reading →
[Part I can be found here.] About a month after being photographed with a gun at the Hibernia bank robbery and then coming out as the chic revolutionary “Tania,” Patty Hearst participated in still another crime. This time she covered … Continue reading →
[Part II can be found here.] The Jill Carroll kidnapping was dreadful from the very beginning: watching videos of the young woman, pleading and crying; imagining the emotional state of her family and friends, and most especially her parents; trying … Continue reading →
This extremely sad news greeted me when I went to Yahoo to check my email today: “Christopher Reeve’s Widow Dies at Age 44.” I can’t say I followed the entire saga of the Reeve family all that closely, but I … Continue reading →
[This is the second of two parts. Part I can be found here.] Goebbels was an extraordinarily intelligent and even learned man who had earned a doctorate in literature and philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. Here is a description … Continue reading →
[This is the first of a two-part series. Part II will appear tomorrow.] Every now and then I read about a person whose life seems so strangely compelling that I can’t help but write about it. In telling such a … Continue reading →
Well, Churchill or Orwell he’s not. But Robert Frost isn’t too bad with the quotations, either–even some political ones (see here and here.) I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old. … Continue reading →