This story from yesterday’s Daily Telegraph illustrates a point I made a few years ago in my book Honor, A History about how hard it is for those of us who are the creatures of a post-honor society to understand honor cultures in general and non-Western honor cultures in particular. A 16-year-old girl was raped in…
When Bob Herbert of the New York Times’s junior varsity of op-ed page lefties is writing about “Obama’s Credibility Gap,” you’d think it would be well past time for the President to sit up and take notice. “Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He…
In my last post I mentioned that The New York Times sometimes seems to be trying to pretend to its readers that the Western honor culture is not only dead but that it never existed in the first place — by, for example, claiming that “a pile of rubble is a pile of rubble,” whether it…
It hasn’t taken long for the shock of the appalling spectacle of the Haitian earthquake to wear off — at least enough for the appropriate liberal and progressive lessons to be drawn from it. That must be why we find in today’s New York Times this story by Marc Lacey, reporting from Port-au-Prince, about New…
A respectful period romance which, however, doesn’t give us as much of the period as it does of the romance
To be titillated by the darkest of human emotions is to be vain of one’s intellect — From The American Spectator of December, 2009-January, 2010
There sounds to my ear a note of relief and even triumph in Ruth Marcus’s announcement in today’s Washington Post that “the tables-turned, she-cheated-on-him political sex scandal we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived.” We’ve all been waiting for? Well, I suppose that those of us who are either voyeurs or feminists — or…
There can be few tasks more invidious — or hopeless — than being called upon in a public forum to deny that you are stupid. This, of course, is what Sarah Palin has been called upon to do because of a new book whose most sensational revelation has so far been that the Senate Majority…
A chick-flick for women of a certain age — and a certain age greater than their emotional one
Eric Rohmer, one of the greatest geniuses ever to work in film — a medium (and a business) not quite hospitable to genius — died yesterday at the age of 89. Born Maurice Schérer in Tulle, in the Dordogne, in 1920, he studied literature at the University of Nancy and became associated with the French…
A very watchable film with a highly unoriginal Big Idea about the origins of war and violence
“U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing,” says The New York Times in response to today’s news of a further 85,000 unemployed. That’s all right, that’s OK, the upswing’s coming anyway. “Some economists fixed on a potentially positive trend tucked within the data,” the Times reassured. “For a fifth consecutive month, temporary help…
