Architect of Himself
Arriving recently in one of those hotels whose bedroom windows do not open by more than two inches in case the guests should immediately precipitate themselves out of them and ...
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Pass the Snail Syrup
My tailor gave me the good news first: My measurements hadn’t changed in more than 20 years. The bad news was that he thought that the suit he was going ...
Brother Cornel in Britain
When Brother Cornel — also known as Dr. West, depending on the context — came to Britain, the Guardian newspaper, the daily Bible reading of Britain’s state-funded intelligentsia, reported that ...
Totalitarian Tasting Menu
The Pyongyang Restaurant in Amsterdam, which serves Korean food in a North Korean ambience, is in a neighborhood of the city, a $40–50 taxi ride from the historic center, that ...
Differently the Same
Just before the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the now-defunct British humor magazine Punch ran a number of cartoons about them. One showed the sex test that would be run there ...
The Church of Grievance
Protest and violence are like gunpowder and explosion: It is not altogether surprising when one leads to the other. This is especially so when the protest is not the expression ...
Bad News
Until I read this book, I fondly thought that I was a pessimist; but now, having read it, I realize that on the Cassandra scale of one to ten I ...
Stumbles the EU Colossus
When I look out from my house at my land in France, I find myself now asking a very strange question: Could we live here in autarky? It is rather ...
Little Emperors
Being a member of the European political class means never having to say you are wrong — much less, of course, having to say you are sorry. As a member ...
Mad as Hell
The vicissitudes of the marketplace are, as everyone knows, not easily calculable. Who, for example, would have foreseen that a pamphlet written by a 93-year-old man, and published by a ...