Category: Access

3

Merrick Garland: American Vyshinsky

Andrey Vyshinsky was Stalin’s prosecutor during the Great Purge of 1936-39. He came up with the phrase, “Give me the man and I’ll find the crime.” That’s not remote. In 2009, Harvey Silvergate, a Boston civil rights lawyer, penned a book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.” 

38

Wednesday’s Child: Not Bread Alone

“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”

5

Make My Day

If you are unwise enough to be on one or another social medium, you will have read something like this: “If you want to disagree with my futile ill-thought out and clumsily expressed opinion on X Y or Z, go ahead and make my day. I can’t wait to unfriend you”?  Do you ever wonder what is going on in someone’s mind, when he issues such a  taunt?   I automatically unfriend such people, even if I agree with their position. I no longer have to teach low-achieving American adolescents with exaggerated opinions of themselves.  I am speaking of the early...

12

Book of the Week: Bite of the Bulldog

And now for something completely different! Since Polish novelists and ancient historians have proved to be too daunting or time-consuming for most readers, I am taking a different tack and devoting a few days to Bite of the Bulldog (initially titled simply Bulldog Drummond), a short thriller in which the reader meets one of the great pop fiction heroes of the last century, Bulldog Drummond.

17

Either/Or

A few weeks ago, our pastor informed us that the Bishop, who over a year ago had freed Catholics from their Sunday obligation, had pushed the on button and informed us that it was now a grave sin to fail to do what we did not have to do a week earlier.  What gives?