[An address to the cadets and staff of the New Mexico Military Academy] About a month ago, there was a story in The New York Times titled "As Economy Dips, Arrests for Shoplifting Soar." Here’s part of what the report says: "We used to see more repeat offenders doing it because of drug addiction," said…
As an analysis of what happened, not only to The New Yorker but American culture itself over the last 20 years, I recommend an article titled “Literary Elite Dazzled by Their Own Creation” by David Burchell in The Australian of today’s date, which is an illustration of how a foreigner may understand us better than…
I came upon the following two news items on the same day. Obituaries in The Times and The Daily Telegraph of London noted the passing, at the age of 108, of one of the last three surviving British veterans of World War I. Chief Petty Officer Bill Stone was also the last sailor of the Royal…
Tina Brown, like the poor, we have always with us, apparently. Having made the transit from Tatler to Vanity Fair to The New Yorker to the ill-fated Talk, she has at last fetched up, like every other bit of journalistic flotsam, including yours truly, on the Internet. Her latest enterprise is called The Daily Beast,…
According to The Washington Post, Barack Obama has “stunned the national intelligence community by selecting Clinton White House chief of staff Leon E. Panetta, a longtime Washington insider with little intelligence experience, to serve as the next head of the CIA.” Though he is “widely regarded as a good manager who knows the government bureaucracy well,”…
An interesting convergence of the journalistic social studies makes a fittingly inspirational meditation for this holiday season and conclusion to 2008. In Monday’s Washington Post we learned that a learned article in the January number of Pediatrics has found that “teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital…
Amazingly, the media seemed to believe in their own absurdly hyperbolical romance of the Obama candidacy for the presidency — From The New Criterion of December, 2008
When I was a school-teacher, I used to be in charge of something called “General Studies.” This meant that I got to meet several times a week with brighter pupils in order to put to them such challenging and troublesome questions as “Why work?” Or “Why should we save the whales?” Or “Should one tolerate…
A charming romance — as these things go nowadays — built along fairy tale lines which also appeals to the multiculturalist in all of us
In Favor of Senator Caroline. . . Look, folks, we’re going to get someone not to our conservative liking anyway. Isn’t it better, then, to get someone who is less likely to be an effective legislator, such as Caroline Kennedy, formerly Caroline Schlossberg, than someone who is more likely to be one, such as her…
The New York Times obit told us she was “a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious ’60s.” The Times liked this formulation so well that…
How quickly the wretched of the world’s Communist hell-holes seem to learn the ways of the West! Or at least those of the Western media. In a profile in today’s Washington Post, Shin Dong-hyuk, the only man known to have escaped from the North Korean gulag of dictator Kim Jong Il and lived to tell…
