Matthew Walther
Rod Liddle at the Spectator (of London, not the excellent American magazine to which this blog is adjunct) is in fine form, with a column about the British left’s outraged response to a New Statesman essay by British feminist Suzanne Moore: One of…
Let’s conduct a straw poll. Who has heard of Guns & Ammo magazine? That’s what I thought. Please don’t laugh at me. I know that it’s at every supermarket magazine aisle in the country. Never opened it, or cared to, but…
I read yesterday in our former paper of record that the Obama administration has “pledged to help the French in their fight against Islamist militants in Mali.” “Help” here means, apparently, that the administration is promising “air and other logistical…
Clarence Thomas has spoken during an oral argument for the first time in more than half a decade, according to the Wall Street Journal. The associate justice remarked that a defendant must not have received capable legal counsel, since his attorney graduated…
Ghostwriting, reworking old material, writing about subjects one doesn’t know for little or, in some cases, no pay: Dr. Johnson’s Grub Street sounds a lot like today’s publishing industry, doesn’t it? So says Laura Miller anyway, in a recent Salon…
Yesterday Ben Stein offered high praise for Pat Buchanan’s speech at the Richard M. Nixon Centenial dinner Wednesday night in Washington. The video is now up at CSPAN (or you can read the text over at The American Conservative), and it’s every bit…
Theodore Dalrymple, blogging over at the Salisbury Review, suggests the French have discovered a novel approach to aggregate demand management: the ritual burning of new and used automobiles. Automobile manufacturers, insurance companies, emergency workers—who doesn’t stand to benefit? Besides, as the good…
Oh, the things a hack novelist will do to move copies! Macmillan has just published an alternate history novel by C.J. Sansom, the British crime writer famed for his Matthew Shardlake cycle, in which Britain makes peace with the Nazis…
Joseph Anton: A Memoir By Salman RushdieRandom House, 636 pages, $30) Like British pounds, British knighthoods have lost much of their value in the last few decades. In the halcyon, pre-decimal 1950s, one pound was equal to nearly three American…
Nice to see Victoria Beale at the New Republic taking to task that well-compensated moralistic therapeutic atheist Alain de Botton, who, thankfully, has not really caught on as much in the U.S. Our homegrown equivalent of the type who “might read The Guardian…
