Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Naples
The barbarians are near, we feel their corrosive breath on our necks, and unlike their predecessors these new ones cannot be absorbed…
Category: Access
What I Learned From My First Flight Since Lockdown
I arrived back in Paris the day before lockdown in March of this year. I had cut short a business/ski trip in Bulgaria under advice from friends, though by Monday night, as I arrived back into Paris with all the shops in the airport already closed, it looked like wisdom.
Systemic Sexism
I am not just angry. No, “angry” does not begin to describe my outrage. For 400 years, my people have been oppressed and living in fear. And this injustice has been virtually ignored while we continue to suffer torment and mistreatment.
Wednesday’s Child: Will They Ever Learn?
It is curious that Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase about speaking softly and carrying a big stick is the progenitor of “big stick foreign policy,” though in fairness it should really have given us a totally opposite doctrine, “speak softly foreign policy.”
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Venice
A friend wrote that he had been lent a sailboat and would be moored in Venice over the weekend, and would I want to dine in his company? With the insouciance born of longstanding habit I replied that I would with pleasure, if only he coughs up the money I need to get there
Europe’s Stake in the US Presidential Election
The question that is looming before the world is this: Who in America—and in the West as a whole—is going to be represented by the 46th President of the United States? If President Trump is reelected, the winners will be the Christian–mostly conservative–patriots all over the West…
Wednesday’s Child: Bolshie Dames
In today’s totalitarian Russia, women are in the vanguard of political repression, and the funny thing is that, were I to paint portraits of some of them, the gentle reader would doubtless be able to relate their traits to his own experience and recognize in one of them the figure of the woman who runs the music department of a college near his house…
The Old Normal is Alive and Well in Paris
I’ve spent my entire life in countries with unrestricted freedom of movement. Not only did those countries let me go where I wanted, whenever I wanted, as long as I wasn’t breaking laws, the countries were indifferent to my location on a given day at a given time.
Wednesday’s Child: White Lies Matter
Do black lives matter? Clearly, if the story of the Rwandan genocide to which I alluded here a couple of weeks ago is any indication, they do not.
You Are Living Fourth Generation Warfare
Fourth Generation War is non-state warfare. It’s when the state breaks down, or just becomes so weak it loses the monopoly of force.
