Win the battle, lose the war. On April 1, Israel did the civilized world a favor by hitting an Iranian terrorist conclave in Damascus, Syria. The Iranian regime threatened to rain fire on Israel. “Don’t,” was President Joe Biden’s public message to Iran on April 13. Just hours later, Iran fired one of the largest, […]

Yes, Herman Melville sold a lot of books before he died, but it was his Typee, an account of “life among the savages,” that captured the popular imagination, not the unloved and disregarded Moby-Dick. Perhaps the most depressing part of seriously studying English literature is realizing just how little of it was actually read at any […]

Benjamin Franklin was, as the children say these days, built different. The Pennsylvanian founding father studiously maintained a chart bearing seven columns, for each day of the week, and 13 rows, one for each of 13 central virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Each week, Franklin […]

When Woody Allen talks about the directors he seeks to emulate, imitate, or merely copy from, the names he is likely to mention are Ingmar, Federico, and maybe Jean (as in Renoir). Notwithstanding his well-publicized penchant for the giants of midcentury European cinema, Allen also owes a major debt to a far less pretentious (and, […]

Several animals emerge with no credit whatsoever from Animal Farm. Benjamin the donkey is a case-hardened pessimist, as stolidly indifferent to conditions under the new regime as he was to the tyranny of Farmer Jones. The sheep are credulous dimwits, whose only function is to chant their approval for Napoleon’s self-aggrandizing schemes, while the Manor […]

HBO’s The Sympathizer enters the television lineup with two strikes against it. In the first place, the limited series’s 2015 source novel, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, was among the worst Pulitzer Prize winners in recent memory, a geopolitical navel-gazer that “thrilled” flattering book critics’ voguish anti-Westernism. In the second, the show’s conceit has already been […]

William Long graduated high school in 2011 and, like many, regrets missing the high military deployment days of the mid-2000s. He might not have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, but he had the great honor of serving his home and neighbors in Oklahoma. On May 20, 2013, shortly after he enlisted in the Oklahoma Army […]

Nothing is quite as Californian as the lose-lose policymaking of hamstringing oneself for a pointless cause and failing in that cause anyway. California’s water policy over the last several decades has amounted to suffocating farms in the Central Valley, the most important farmland in the country, in order to save fish species that are dying […]

“Short guys like us,” a friend of mine said to me recently, “should never get their pictures taken when they’re standing next to someone tall.” “Short guys like us? What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, not exactly in those words. I used a colorful Anglo-Saxon vulgarism in there, once or twice, for emphasis. My […]

The largest smartphone “dating” app for gay people believes it can boost its stock price, it seems, by optimizing even more for promiscuity and sex with strangers. Dating sites typically try to match users with other users who live in the same city. Grindr’s executives worry that this standard is growing stale, according to media […]