Books
The de Waal family is back with another romp through 20th century European history.
"Why I Read" is another pointless entry in the tired genre, The Very Personal Book About My Love Of Reading.
This is what it's like to be an American spy in the Middle East.
The nobel laureate
Richard Bove's alarmist, snarky defense of big banks.
Please, Liberals: Stop Abusing 'A Tale of Two Cities'
It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines
It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines—and now it's a cliche with no connection to a great book.
There Will Never Be a Unified Theory of JFK
What a year of retrospectives missed about the martyred president
What the JFK retrospectives all missed is that JFK was psychologically inconsistent. Only his context explains him.
Stop Hating Scrooge!
The 'Christmas Carol' curmudgeon is a forward-thinking liberal
Now that Christmas is safely behind us, and the mob atmosphere of virtue and piety has evaporated; now that, in the post-holiday doldrums, the stacks of wrapping paper have removed themselves to their ghastly translucent plastic bags and the dead trees have begun, one by one, to lie across the sidewalk, forming their final, horizontal forest, in premonition of the universal fate—now, at gloomy last, something should be said on behalf of Christmas's eternal victim, the ever-persecuted Scrooge, who, for all his failings, got one large thing right.
The most important books in shaping my thinking.
The real secret about perversion? It doesn't exist.
