Some time ago, I got so tired of reading about things “slouching towards Bethlehem”, or at least slouching somewheres, that I took upon myself to announce that no one, with the exception of Huckleberry Finn, would be allowed to use that verb, at once so affectedly literary and so uncouth that the poor word was…
Search Results for: Tea Party
Why the Nunes memo totally sucks
If you’re looking for good taste, forget it. This blog is not for the faint of heart: others offer you candy pills; Literature R Us supplies the real dope,1 The memo issued by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes attacks the Department of Justice and the FBI for obtaining a warrant under the Federal Intelligence…
The Post? What about The Times? What about The Truth?
Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bore us to death with virtuous films, first with Bridge of Spies and now with The Post, films that consist almost entirely of old white people standing around and talking, a lot. Bridge of Spies is about one honest man who makes…
The Crown, Season 2: Yeah, Queen!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME2umFQ_xBA Last year, I gave a severe thumb’s down to Netflix’s $100 million (seriously?) ode to Good Queen Bess II, aka The Crown, in a post wittily titled “Hey , Netflix! “The Crown” sucks!” and swore I’d never watch another episode. But then I came up with a head—viz, “Yeah, Queen!”—that was so damn funny—seriously,…
Polite Conversation
(Editor’s Advice: If you don’t know who Colly Cibber is, you probably shouldn’t read this piece.) In one of W. H. Auden’s essays, he remarks that English literature had a strong tendency to become a sort of cozy, family affair, full of in-jokes that bound everyone who was in together and excluded all those who…
The Cold War: A Tale of Two Joes
I’ve been reading Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s vastly ambitious and very largely successful The Cold War A World History.1 One of the great advantages of reading a European’s take is that he has a much more nuanced understanding of what was happening in Europe during the Cold War than an American historian would. He’s…
A World of Struggle at Harvard Law
(Author’s Note: The following is a sprawling takedown of David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle, a book that clearly got my goat.) Pankaj Mishra is the author of several fascinating books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and his new one Age of Anger, which I am struggling to get…
Jamie Dimon, last seen talking out of both sides of his mouth
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., is widely assumed to be a very smart man, as well as a very rich one. BloombergPolitics catches up with Jamie on his way back from a trip abroad to Israel, Ireland and France and reports the following: “It’s almost an embarrassment being an American traveling around…
The silence of the Donald, the pusillanimity of the Republicans
Okay, Donald Trump hasn’t been entirely silent. “Trump proposes a law that’s existed for 20 years”, snickers USA Today with well-earned glee, reporting on our president’s proposed crackdown on free-loading legal immigrants, who, naturally, aren’t free loading at all. Then there’s his epic links “faux pas”—running his golf cart onto a green because he’s too…
Who is worse, Donald Trump or the Republican Congress?
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Do Republican members of Congress tweet absurd, scurrilous, and/or libelous messages that frequently contradict or disrupt the Administration’s own policies, to the extent that the Administration rarely pursues a course of action over a measurable period of time with enough self-consistency to be called a policy? Do they tell grotesque…