Matthew Walther
Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down is an enlightening and entertaining book about why we can’t always win and why that’s okay. I spoke with the blogging pioneer and former correspondent for the Economist and the Atlantic, about bankruptcy in Denmark, the history of Viagra,…
The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers DrinkBy Olivia Laing(Picador, 340 pages. £20) Here, on the fecund subject of drink, are two famous novelists: I began writing in fearful earnest—my mind zoomed all night every night, and I don’t think I really…
Let’s be honest: the images that came out of Sochi yesterday were sickening. Thugs in uniforms beating young women with horsewhips, kicking them to the ground and throwing their things in garbage cans — piggish behavior in defense, we are…
I’m not really up to the task of dissecting Jeff’s 1,200-word post about me. His grasp of English syntax is shaky; his sentiments, hysterical; his understanding of history, cartoonish. For him Gerald Ford and Ted Heath are Marlovian stage villains rather…
They ranged the holy hecatomb all orderly round the altar of the god…hymning him and chaunting the joyous paean, and the god took pleasure in their voices. Here’s hoping that Homer (translated above by the admirable but neglected Samuel Butler)…
Jeff Lord has unleashed his usual barrage of single-sentence (and sometimes single-fragment) paragraphs on Commentary‘s Pete Wehner. Jeff heavy-handedly suggests that Wehner is some sort of squish because he and Jeff disagree about the efficacy of the recent government shutdown: Clear to…
Lately the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” has begun to receive some attention from writers outside the Blogspot crypts and Tumblr grottos where it has been flourishing quietly since it was christened two or so years ago by the expatriate English philosopher…
Why is no one writing about Girls, which returned to HBO on Sunday night? During its first two seasons everyone seemed to have an opinion about it. Week in and week out certain Other Websites (the ones whose names begin with…
Rod Dreher at the American Conservative linked to this quiz the other day, which purports to predict one’s politics on the basis of one’s cultural preferences. I like cats slightly more than dogs, use Chrome rather than Internet Explorer (doesn’t everyone?), and…
Perhaps it had to be this way. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Rodman could go to North Korea. The weirdest man for the weirdest country, right? I am nothing if not a child of the ‘90s, so…
