The war in Ukraine is not going the way the West expected, despite what is being said in the context of the hybrid war that usually accompanies military conflicts. The Biden government, after cancelling overnight Donald Trump’s isolationist policy and waking up the monster of inflation, is watching in confusion and bewilderment.
For me a walk through Palermo, with or without the baby in his pram, would be incomplete without greeting Tony. I knew his late father, who died of cancer some years ago, but then who didn’t?
The Financial Times, which has moved from moderate liberal a few years ago to warmonger, titled a new story “Russian menace brings abrupt end to the west’s ‘peace dividend’”
Four of these movies are genuine anomalies for their makers. The fifth is the best film by a very famous and successful director-writer whose other movies—and I’ve seen nearly all of them—reliably disappoint me.
As a virtue expressed in Aristotelian terms, it is the mean between the character that invests everything into the distinction between me-and-mine and everything else and the character that rejects all distinction. In Jacobin terms, however, liberty, equality, and fraternity represent either or both of these three baneful extremes.
Why would a dumb kid from Simi Valley, California, want to kill Brett Kavanaugh?
Italian is a language not averse to populism, apparently, because the word palazzo means both a nobleman’s palace, such as the one where Cinderella crashed the party, and an apartment building inhabited by lowly plebes, such as the one where I live.
This is the month in times past we used to celebrate such wicked conceptions as “Father’s Day.” Now we pause (for a whole month…and large parts of the others) to pay homage to sexual perversity and gender confusion.
A senile and corrupt President presides over a ruined economy and risks nuclear war with Russia, while the American people stay tuned to Heard v. Depp v. Heard. A 15 minute podcast on America’s celebrity universe.
As I walk the streets with the baby in his pram, I scrutinize the faces of passing women and note how few distinct types there are in Palermo. The streets here are a kind of itinerant art museum, where in a single day one sees quite a few Parmigianinos, Pollaiuolos, and Ghirlanaios. How else? Their ancestors, bakers’ daughters or admirals’ wives, probably sat for all those portraits.
