With all this talk of the NSA and its activities, espionage has stormed back onto the front pages. Perfect time to publish a spy novel set in China, the USA and Germany, one should think, and cometh the hour, cometh the man in the form of Olen Steinhauer. That surname suggests another Nordic star but [...]
Noam Chomsky: Not a gadfly or a lunatic, but an actual monster
Benjamin Kerstein, author of Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, believes that the leftist ideologue Noam Chomsky is more than a mere crank and crackpot. He’s a monster. Kerstein makes his case using the example of the German thinker Martin Heidegger: “Now, there is no doubt that Heidegger was a brilliant philosopher, and most of his philosophy [...]
And don’t you come back no more, no more
“It is a sign of just how completely Barack Obama has ‘lost his narrative’ since getting elected that the best case he has yet made for reelection is that Mitt Romney should not be president. In his notorious ‘you didn’t build that’ speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the [...]
Ospedale delle bambole
Near the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, at via di Ripetta 29, the venerable Squatriti family operates its Restaurici Artistici Squatriti, a kind of A&E (Accident and Emergency) of the Italian doll world, where the old and infirm are repaired and restored or reused for parts. In many ways, it combines some ancient and some [...]
Tangled points of view, and all of them blue
“Life is sad / Life is a bust / All ya can do is do what you must / You do what you must do / And ya do it well / I’ll do it for you, honey baby / Can’t you tell?” Buckets of Rain from Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, released [...]
Julian Assange is a rape suspect who skipped bail
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill, the editor of spiked, gets it exactly right in “Here’s why Julian Assange is the most annoying and arrogant person in the whole world“. Snippet: The liberal set’s beatification of Julian Assange reached stratospheric levels of stupidity in recent years. A fanboy book on Wikileaks by Guardian journalists [...]
Libyan embassy 1984, Ecuadorian embassy 2012
The standoff between the governments of Great Britain and Ecuador because the latter has allowed its embassy to be used as a hideout for the alleged sex offender Julian Assange brings back memories of another London embassy drama, one which resulted in the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher. And the murderer got away with it, [...]
Slovenly Slate, ghastly Guardian, zany Zeit smear of Paul Ryan
The biased nature of what passes for journalism today was on full display yesterday when three media organs participated in a smear of Paul Ryan that would be laughable were it not so dreadful. First up was Slate, where the Andrew Sullivan lookalike, typealike Matthew Yglesias could not resist repackaging unsupported insider trading accusations leveled [...]
How the Mad Men marketed coffee
Produced by Vision Associates in 1961 as a promotional film for the Coffee Brewing Institute, This is Coffee has been placed in the public domain thanks to the Prelinger Archives. Coffee, is there anything it cannot do? Study: Coffee Lowers Colon Cancer Risk. And there’s this: Coffee Cuts Alzheimer’s Disease Risk. Drink lots today! Send [...]
The Death of Helen Gurley Brown and the death of the magazine
Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations released its latest batch of statistics on magazine sales in the United States. Overall paid circulation declined slightly, by 0.1 percent, in the first half of 2012, but newsstand sales — often seen as the best indicator of a magazine’s appeal — fell by nearly 10 percent. Women’s [...]
The Freedom Games
As George Michael sang Freedom during the closing ceremony of the London Olympics last night, the stadium lighting system flashed the world “Freedom” across the crowded arena. It was a wonderful moment because these really were the Freedom Games. And the proof was provided by the medal table, where the tally of the United States, [...]
M. C. Escher in Milan
The first print of an impossible reality that M. C. Escher created was Still Life and Street in 1937. Other early works include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on shadow to meld the water background behind fish figures into [...]
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