Woody Allen is not large, but he contains multitudes, and some of them show up in his “controversial” autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, which the powers of righteous wokitude finally allowed to be published back in 2020, which I got around to reading in 2021 and am now “reviewing” in 2022. I have read many autobiographies,…
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Nice essay, George F. Will! But not, you know, perfect!
Hey, Georgie boy’s snappy retrospective of how a slightly pushy young lad from the sticks became the biggest goddamn Bow Tie the Beltway had ever seen—The pursuit of happiness is happiness—is not at all a bad read, informative and even touching at times, words I haven’t always used when discussing Mr. Will. I was particularly…
Good Dan Drezner, Bad Dan Drezner
What would life be without Dan Drezner? Dan is an ever-flowing cornucopia of ideas, most of them irritating, but not a few thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Let’s start with the good, a double surprise, really, because not only is Dan’s column from a few months back, Free Trade With Benefits a good one, for…
Will the COVID wreck our liberal urban demi Edens? Well, maybe, but only if we liberals help. And we are.
What hath COVID wrought? And what will it wreak? Hard to say. If all goes well, we could be back to “normal”, pretty much, this summer. But if things go sideways, with wily new strains that our current miracle vaccines can’t counter, well, unpleasant to think about, especially for us urban liberals, who have been…
Will Geography Damn Us? Probably.
Al Gore won the presidency in 2000 by almost half a million votes. Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by almost three million. Joe Biden would have won the presidency in 2020 sans COVID-19 by, probably, about six million votes. Yet, in fact, Gore lost to Bush, Hillary lost to Trump, and sans COVID Joe very…
The Billiard Ball Causality of Francis Fukuyama, Together With Other Considerations
I have recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s excellent book, Identity The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, published back in 2018, trying to explain why the world isn’t behaving the way Francis and I think it ought, and not doing a bad job of it at all. I’ve written round and about Dr….
Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel
I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American…
The Literary Offenses of William Faulkner
(Author’s note: Easily the greatest piece of literary criticism in American letters is Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”, though I believe Mark might have titled it more euphoniously. My piece takes a much more somber hue than Mark’s, exploring, to be blunt, Faulkner’s frequent failure to free himself emotionally from the limitations of his…
Happy Days Are Here Again! Comparatively speaking, I mean.
Anyone reading this under—well, under fifty, I’m afraid—may not get the reference, to the once famous Democratic victory song, which goes back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but getting Donald Trump out of the White House is sweet indeed, though taking the 2020 election results as a whole, it’s rather like sitting down to eat…
Has Boss Schumer’s Hour Come Round At Last?
“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Thus Charles Schumer, senior senator from New York and possible new majority leader of the Senate, to be…