Wednesday’s Child: On Friendship
We have all written about love, from Plato to Dr. Fleming and back again, but at this fandango to the music of love friendship is the wallflower.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Learn Italian, Lesson 9
Simple conversations, jobs, more present tense (andare), and the days of the week.
Back to the Future II: The Olympics
I haven’t paid much attention to the Olympics for years. It. has been a long time since the Games were a genuine amateur sport. All my life they have been big business that guaranteed endorsements and jobs to the winners. When the allowed professional basketball players in, it was a public declaration that they were giving up the pretense.
Back to the Future
I’ve been in 15th century Florence, to be precise, colloguing with Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola, Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli, and others. As a traveler in time and space, I was eager to share my thoughts on the American present, which for them is an unimaginably distant future.
Inner Party Putsch Ousted Biden
What you just saw was a putsch by the Inner Party against Joe Biden, the duly elected president of the United States and the nominee for re-election by the Democratic Party after winning the vast majority of primary voters. Here’s the 2024 count:
Some Perspective on How a 20-Year-Old Could Shoot Trump and Almost Kill Him
The real question in the attempted assassination is not, could a 20-year-old shoot and nearly kill former President Trump, but how he was allowed to get in position to do so. The shot itself was not that hard. Here’s some perspective.
Where’s Biden?
I remember when President Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981. I was serving in the U.S. Army in West Germany as a Russian linguist in a mobile intelligence unit.
Wednesday’s Child: Peace on Earth
Two kinds of ideas animate the world. One kind is private, hermetic, sovereign; I would go as far as to call it anaerobic, by analogy with the bacteria that perish when exposed to air and light. Fedor Tiutchev, Russia’s most original nineteenth-century poet, had this variety in mind when we wrote his “Silentium”: “Keep silent, secret, and obscured / Thy thoughts and dreams without end, / And let them rise like stars, inured / To darkness regnant in thine head.”
Learn Italian, Lessons 5- 8
The present tense of verbs, vocabulary for getting around and talking about the weather.
Wednesday’s Child: Other Figures
My paternal grandmother’s family was from Vitebsk, where it was well remembered that as a callow youth Marc Chagall made a living painting shop signs in that provincial town. It turns out, however, that the canvases Chagall produced in the years preceding his emigration to France are perhaps the only pictures of lasting value – of genius, a more impulsive chronicler would say – ever painted on the territory of the Russian, and then Soviet, empire.
