BY USING STALE METAPHORS, SIMILES, and idioms,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, “you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.” He thought political writing suffered particularly from…
It always seemed strangely appropriate that Frank Sinatra died on the day of the Seinfeld finale— 10 years ago this past May. On a night when America was set to celebrate a sitcom’s elevation of irony to unforeseen cultural heights,…
This has not been a good year for inevitability. In February the New England Patriots, at 18-0 and one inevitable win away from sports immortality, couldn’t quite close the deal and lost to the New York Giants in the final…
If you watch the Hillary video of the remarks, it’s clear – to me, anyway – that she actually was trying to make the point about primary campaigns going on long, even if, as Drudge and others are pointing out,…
This article appeared in the February 2008 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here. That Sunday, September 8, 1974, my parents were batting the names “Ford” and “Nixon” around our house like verbal…
For my ailing father, who watched in person as Alan Ameche barreled forward to kill the Giants in 1958, who sat through – again, in person – the 1962 NFL title loss in Yankee Stadium, in Arctic conditions, to the…
Baseball’s Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs has already provoked a blizzard of commentary ranging from whom to blame, what to do, and musings about what has gone wrong with professional sports. Rather than adding my two cents, and being always…
Phil: It would also show her unfitness for the pressures of the office. She wilted under a non-attack from a moderator who was doing his job by asking fair questions. The press has been generous, and she has faced a…
Last night’s was the first debate this year that I have been able to watch more or less in its entirety, so I don’t have near the familiarity that others here do, but some thoughts: The format is beneath contempt….
Of all film genres, horror should be the most timeless, since fear is a primal emotion, immune to cultural trends. Yet more often than not, horror films become period pieces, scaring one generation, provoking laughter from the next. The exceptions…