Yes, I know I should be moralizing about teenage white boys from Kentucky, but I’d rather be writing about New York Jews. Because I gotta be me! My kvetch du jour is a lengthy piece by Columbia University professor Stephen Wertheim appearing a few weeks ago in the New York Review of Books’s NYR Daily,…
Author: Alan Vanneman
A Social Call
(Another short story in the manner of Rex Stout, featuring Nero Wolfe.) “I’m afraid that would be impossible.” “I agree entirely. And it’s been my experience that when things are impossible, they don’t happen. Which means that we should just forget about this.” She laughed. “But that would be impossible as well.” “I assure you…
Sphericity
Thelonious Sphere Monk probably did not drink as much bourbon as William Faulkner. He probably did not shoot as much heroin as William Burroughs, or smoke as much marijuana as Norman Mailer, or get as many “vitamin shots” from feel-good Manhattan doctors as John F. Kennedy. But he had his share. He had his measure….
Sachal Vasandani & Ben Wendel—“Reflections”
That’s Ben on sax and Sach supplying the soulful vocal. I admit it (how can I deny it?) that I’ve been slacking off on the Monk videos for the past several weeks. Yeah, it’s Christmas, or it was, and, yeah, I’ve got another novel in the works, but neither is a remotely good excuse! Fortunately,…
The “Struggle” for the “Soul” of the Republican Party: When Vapid Met Vaporous
Unless you actually have a life, you may be aware of a “struggle” going on now for the “soul”, loosely speaking, of the Republican Party. In one corner you have Brink “Mr. Nice Guy” Lindsey, arguing in National Affairs for “Republicanism for Republicans” and in the other Tucker “Bow Tie/Blue Collar” Carlson, who moans that…
Clint Eastwood’s “Mule”: Very Largely (Yet Not Entirely) Disappointing
When I saw the ads for Clint Eastwood’s possibly final film, The Mule, I was—rather shockingly, since I haven’t seen one of his films since In the Line of Fire (1993, and excellent)—intrigued. A gritty tale of shady, sleazy drug deals gone wrong, with the twist that the hapless protagonist caught in the middle is…
Alan Vanneman’s List O’ Lists
Christmas/New Year’s is the time for lists. You can’t blame journalists for wanting to have a life, can you? So they make lists, aka “phoning it in”. There are only two list-makers I like, so my list will not be long: Dan Drezner: “Your nonfiction book picks for the end of 2018 Actually, Dan makes…
The Marx Brothers Revisited: You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me
A week or so back, I snickered (rather loudly) at the expense of Ann Coulter, to the extent of complimenting her, with rather heavy-handed irony, on her looong memory (‘cause she’s, you know, old) for pop cultural trivia, to wit: Her awareness of the fourth Marx brother, “Zeppo”.1 In the course of doing so, I…
Catherine Rampell is confused. I enlighten her.
WashPost columnist Catherine Rampell—Princeton Phi Bet and winner of the Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism—is struggling with the evidence: The real question is why congressional leaders, including [now former House Speaker Paul] Ryan,1 repeatedly cave to Trump’s latest tweets and fleeting fancies instead of writing him off as the flake that he is. Why…
Shorter Ross: We’re almost as bad as the Jews
Alas, poor Douthat! Ross Douthat, I mean, who bravely assumes the task of explaining why he will celebrate another Christmas as a Catholic, despite the, um, unending revelations of unending horrors of sexual abuse and hierarchical coverup that have plagued the Church for the last, I don’t know, twenty or thirty years. To explain his…