The Woeful Whitney
About a decade ago, Time magazine (remember Time?) voted the Genoese-born starchitect Renzo Piano one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He’s won every architectural award possible, ...
Post-war Dreaming
Jed Perl is one of the most ferociously intelligent art critics writing today. From his perch at The New Republic, he issues not only taut reviews of current exhibitions but ...
A Christo Garland
I’d known for years that Christopher Buckley was an amusing man. His novel Thank You for Smoking (1994), for example, had me crying, yes crying, with laughter. But it wasn’t ...
WFB at 88
It is hard to believe that Bill Buckley left us five years ago. He departed before the Age of Obama, before, that is, a president of the United States set ...
Inaugurating President Chamberlain
Obama’s speech: Very long on gaseous generalities; exiguous with details. “Par for the course,” you say. Yes and no. Yes, an inaugural speech is intended to set the tone for ...
A Vicious Narcissus
The novelist and fantasist Gore Vidal, who died last month at 86, must ever occupy a special place in the hearts of National Review’s extended family. I hasten to add that ...
Rediscovering America
How do you spell “triumph”? Try “The new American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts,” which opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in January. From every ...
Always Bet on Black
In the United States, as in most other modern democratic regimes, one of the most important political issues today concerns the relation between the individual and the coercive power of ...
An Eye for the Real
The English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, though an incorrigible commie pinko, was a tart and brilliant observer of life’s panoply. “My own suspicion,” he wrote, “is that the universe ...
A Legacy of Temperament
An honest man, said the poet William Blake, may change his opinions, but not his principles. Irving Kristol, who died in September 2009 just shy of 90, embarked on intellectual ...