The private plane used for delivering women to Epstein was known as the Lolita Express, with reference to Nabokov’s third-rate novel. The same bien pensants who admire the book are among the first to sling mud at Epstein’s shadow, but it is the still wider landscape of morality that makes a nonsense of their hypocritical censoriousness.
The weather’s changed, we are now into the rainy season, and the crowds in pharmacies are out of control. The British equivalent of the Italian drugstore is the local post office branch, because there, too, people socialize while waiting in the interminable queue, with the dispatch of a parcel a mere cover story not unlike the quest for advice regarding a cold sore. The gum-chewing, nose-pierced, orange-haired girl in the window, however, is nothing like the patrician figure of the pharmacist – always male, and portly enough to exude authority – a single word from whose august mouth can make...
Guardia di Finanza has made a lot of headlines over the last few years by ambushing unsuspecting citizens as they left fancy hotels like La Poste in Cortina d’Ampezzo and luxury shops like Prada in Palermo – as well as expensive restaurants, sports car dealers, cigar emporia, men’s tailors, furriers, jewelers, and so on, ordering hapless shoppers to disclose the source of funds that brought upon them the iniquity of spending
A friend of mine died last week. Maybe not a friend, more of an acquaintance, but so monumental were the man’s life and works that my desire to stand for a moment in his shadow is easily understood. These gradations of intimacy – close friend, friend, acquaintance, passing acquaintance, somebody whose book you’ve read, somebody with whom you once shared a seat in a train carriage – are actually quite tricky. It comes down to knowing a person, but when does one really know someone? Cases are a dime a dozen when fathers and sons, and even more commonly husbands...
Gustav Mahler once said that if the public thinks a conductor’s tempo too slow, what he ought to do is to slow it down. Such, anyway, is Wednesday’s Child’s feeble justification for persisting with the theme of the past two weeks, which is the plight of the socially anomalous child East and West. The occlusive membrane separating the home from the state, if one exists and is not ruptured by intrusion of the latter, is in most cases a good thing, indeed one of the condiciones sine quibus non of child rearing. But then, of course, there are cases when...
My post last week occasioned a lively discussion. Not all of it was on point – divertingly, I was made to learn the meaning of “small ball” and “on base percentage” – but let us press on in more or less the same vein. As the gentle reader may recall, last week’s post involved a man in a Russian village who stands to lose his children because one of them has taken up crocheting and there is no television in the family home. For those who wish to follow the story, the man’s name is Ivan Sidorov and the village,...
A curious thing happened some days ago in the village of N– . Nineteenth-century writers were exacting about sparing the localities where their narratives unfolded a likely embarrassment of disclosure, while at the same time saving their audience from fatigue attendant on superfluous knowledge. Hoping that my own gentle reader may one day reward me, if only by renewing his subscription, I shall now adopt this antiquated practice. At first glance the tiny village, with a population of just over a thousand, seems a bucolic and tranquil sort of place, but facts show that it is in fact a human...
I have no statistics to corroborate this, but I would wager the incidents of choking to death in households where grace is said before meals are few and far between.
The political Right, both in the United States and in Europe, has come to perceive the professed worldview of Russia’s ruling junta as a conservative antidote to the poison of modernity, a somber counterweight to the West’s cartoonish decline, and an infusion of plain old horse sense to arrest its slide into liberal dementia. To be sure, the poison and the decline and the dementia are all very much in evidence, yet the plain old horse sense issuing from the mighty steppes west of the Urals, alas, is just demagoguery – eyewash and bunkum on a par with the Soviet...
A new branch of agriculture developed in Russia, perhaps to compensate her denizens for the burning forests and poisoned lakes, is called troll farming. The credit for this innovation goes to the man known as “Putin’s chef,” who also has in the commodious pocket of his apron the government contracts for supplying food to public institutions, such as schools and kindergartens, as evidenced recently by mass outbreaks of salmonella among Moscow’s children.
