The gentle reader may recall that I was once a student at Yale. There, unforgettably, a preternaturally astute classmate named Steve (where is he now, I wonder? In a nuthouse, most likely, along with everybody else who is preternaturally astute) once buttonholed me to deliver a lecture on the architecture of the university, specifically the residential colleges, the Sterling Memorial Library, and other structures of the 1930’s.
I have often wondered about the principle of disclosure, which is so easily taken to interesting lengths. Of course like others I can applaud when a journalist doing a story on some Fortune500 company is criticized for not revealing that the CEO is his brother-in-law, or when a juror is prosecuted for concealing an intimate connection with the man on trial. But beyond that?
All drunken men are alike, one might say paraphrasing Tolstoy, but every drunken woman shows inebriation in her own way. Up to a point, however. When they’ve had one too many, all Russian women of my generation or younger end up singing the same song with the inevitability of a cuckoo clock chiming the hour…
Doubtless the gentle reader appreciates that in two hundred or more posts published in this space during the term of the outgoing administration I hardly ever mentioned President Trump. Instead I sat on my hands, which kept me from biting my nails, and watched the spectacle unfold. Yet kicking a man when he’s down is hardly comme il faut…
Oscar Wilde, as the gentle reader may recall, was undone not by his own crime, which “love that dare not speak its name” was in those balmy days, but by the crime of libel, of which he had incautiously accused Lord Queensberry.
At first glance, abetting a healthy child with full connivance of the state to “change sex” seems to have nothing to do with Marx or socialism. Considering the question more closely, however, we see that gender, like other human endowments, is a form of private property; that it is, in point of fact, a property; and that, along with money, land, and any other means of production, this property can and, a Marxist would argue, must be summarily expropriated.
The identity of the Aragonese noble family associated with mafia style poisonings in Renaissance Italy – as well as with incest, larceny, and simony, among other lesser crimes – is incidental to the story here. I can easily replace the name of Cesare Borgia with that of Claudius of Denmark, likewise known, at least to readers of Shakespeare, for murdering his brother: “My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules.” Prince Hamlet, in fact, was very much on my mind when, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Alexei Navalny’s investigation into his own murder. “I...
Like the word’s Italian variant, coprifuoco, “curfew”–which is now in effect in several European countries–comes from Old French cuevrefeu, “cover fire,” advice to citizens to extinguish fires at a certain hour of the evening. My wife thinks it’s sweet. “It shows concern,” she says. “Just compare it to what we say in Russian.” In Russian the equivalent is “commandant’s hour,” meaning do what you’re told or be brought before the commandant and get the regulation nine grams of lead in the back of your head. Language gives nations away.
“Resolved, That the Earth is Flat” was in my youth the stalking horse of high school and university debating societies, probably because to people of college age the proposition sounded startling enough to make them tingle with anticipation of controversy. Besides, since not one among them believed that the Earth was actually flat, deep down they were pleasantly certain that the outcome of the vote would in no way change their lives, and so on to law school they went. They have debates of narrower scope these days, as many of them, upon finishing law school, clerking for important judges,...
The gentle reader may recall how once I waxed eloquent in lauding sloth, a vice that has done much to save Greek antiquities in Sicily. Vandalized in Greece by energetic locals, who routinely used the marble to build their rustic hovels, in Sicily these noble structures have survived largely intact for the simple reason that our peasants were too indolent to steal. That, anyway, was my working theory. More broadly, sloth is one of the few things that stand between man and the picture of man portrayed by Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Always scheming, always inventing, always eager to...
