It’s embarrassing for me to admit this, as someone who writes a column on the Web, but I almost never pay for online content. Till yesterday I made an exception only for the Wall Street Journal. But if it cost…
All the fuss yesterday about Annika Sorenstam at the Colonial reminds me of how ignorant I am about one of America’s major pastimes. I’ve been surrounded by golf all my life — the house I grew up in was built…
I just read the perfect news story. It isn’t about Iraq, al Qaeda or Jayson Blair, but it tells its story clearly, dramatically and at just the right length for the amount of news in it. How many articles have…
Last week was my first on American soil in more than two years, and my 20-month-old son’s first-ever visit to his fatherland. The boy has had a U.S. passport since he was five weeks old, but before this trip it…
The Louvre and the British Museum are monuments not only to the glory of Britain and France, but to the civilizations they despoiled in their reigns as great powers. Say this at least for the American empire: it must be…
As I was getting on the bus the other evening after work, no sooner had I put a foot inside the door than a guy in his late teens shoved me out of the way, rushing to grab one of…
The so-called Green Line on the island of Cyprus is the southern limit of what Turkish Cypriots call the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, and what Greek Cypriots call the “Turkish Republic of North Cyprus.” That’s the northern third of…
Among the quarter of a million people who gathered in Rome yesterday to mourn the death of Alberto Sordi, many carried banners expressing their love. “Yesterday an American in Rome,” read one, “today a Roman in heaven.” The reference was…
It should have surprised no one when Tariq Aziz, at a press conference last Friday in Rome, refused to answer a question from an Israeli reporter. The big news would have been if he had answered the question. Recognizing, even…
I stopped watching television in the late ’80s, having decided that it was all a waste of time, and that anything I really needed to know I could learn through more mentally demanding media. I followed the first Gulf War…