In June, after Zohran Mamdani somehow bulldozed through the New York Democratic mayoral primary and seized the nomination, I was walking through my neighborhood — I live just north of Manhattan — when a friend saw me and deadpanned: “So when Mayor Mamdani makes the buses free, can we ride them on Shabbos?” This was classic […]
The Democrats’ latest con job is blaming President Donald Trump for former President Joe Biden’s legacy inflation and claiming that Zohran Mamdani-style socialism will solve the “affordability problem” rather than make it far worse. If the Ocasio-Cortez-Sanders-Jeffries crowd gets away with this propaganda, the next “red wave” to wash over America will be a Marxist-controlled Congress […]
An American friend described modern Britain to me as “a health service with a nuclear deterrent.” This is unfair. Modern Britain is a health service with a nuclear deterrent, and also the BBC. President Donald Trump‘s threat to sue Britain’s state broadcaster for $1 billion for its “reckless disregard for the truth” could, if carried out, mean […]
KYIV, Ukraine — Nobody can agree on an acceptable peace in Ukraine. Should Russia be allowed to keep the lands it took by force? Should Ukraine be allowed to join NATO? What sort of security guarantee is sufficient? What sort is reasonable? Deeper questions undergird these. What sort of future is possible for Ukraine? And […]
The first time Nayara Andrejczyk fired a gun, she fell in love. It was a revolver, handed to her at a Pennsylvania range after years of quiet fascination — years spent in Brazil, where guns were the domain of criminals, police, or politicians, often overlapping categories. “It was like the forbidden fruit,” she said. “In […]
In all the words that have been devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick, I do not know whether any writer has invoked Gustave Flaubert’s famous injunction to “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Yet no 20th-century artist, writer, filmmaker, composer, or otherwise, […]
A while back, I told you about my friend David Pingenot, who, in the late 1960s, left his small Iowa farm town seeking a wider view of the world by enlisting in the Navy. I talked to him again recently, and he laughed even before he started telling me this story. He told me, “This […]
Books on the politics of literary works can go wrong in at least two ways: They can reduce the significance of a literary work to the politics of its author or time (and great works are always about more than mere politics), or they can read today’s politics back into the original work, saddling authors […]
For Americans of a certain age and income bracket, Europe is synonymous with Rick Steves, a one-man travel impresario whose guidebooks and tour groups have introduced the continent to thousands of newcomers. Before he became his own brand, Steves was just another scruffy backpacker abroad, an experience he recounts in On the Hippie Trail, a […]
Peter Matthiessen was a towering figure in 20th-century American letters. He was a naturalist, environmentalist, Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, world traveler, CIA agent, and a mystic. He was one of the first writers to be concerned about the extinction of animal species, the care of the environment, and man’s exploitation of indigenous people. His efforts […]