Things are always worse than they seem. That adage may seem amusingly cynical, but that is only because it is…

My favorite line in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard comes midway through the first chapter. The times are unsettled. The Risorgimento is…

Future historians, psephologists, and political analysts, searching for the day and time that Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign imploded beyond recovery,…

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than…

When someone says “Bordeaux wine” most of us think first of wines from the Médoc, home of Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Saint-Estèphe,…

Have you noticed that whenever the conversation turns to the subject of Charles Darwin, an extraordinary amount of dogmatism is…

Like many commentators who have struggled to understand the reasons for the inveterate hatred of Donald Trump among the swank…

The two big stories du jour are 1) the continuing campus assault on sanity, brought to you by the pro-terrorist…

Undoubtedly the best moment in the testimony of Minouche Shafik, the President Columbia University, before the House Committee on Education…

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting. Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight —…

I want to talk about two things in this column: bills of attainder and kangaroo courts. The two often go…

Just as night watchmen are constrained by duty to make their rounds, so are writers about wine. Sometimes the rounds…

It being the Ides of March, I thought it might be worth reflecting briefly on the most famous event that…

I had been told that Joe Biden, the president of the United States, would be delivering the 2024 State of…

In a big victory for democracy, but a big blow to the partisans of ‘Our Democracy™’, the Supreme Court of…

Donald Trump crushed the New Hampshire primary, as every poll in Alpha Centauri predicted he would. Nevertheless, his sole remaining…

What is decadence? In popular usage, it is synonymous with “excess,” especially of a sensual or appetitive nature. I am…

In the 1830s, the English-born American artist Thomas Cole painted an ambitious sequence of five large rectangular canvases delineating “The…

Until now, the person who won the Iowa caucus by the largest margin was Bob Dole back in 1988 –…

Numbers are mysterious things. According to orthodox Roman Catholicism, there are instances in which 3 = 1. You might get…

I advise you to have a bottle of Dramamine on hand before reading Claudine Gay’s nauseating missive announcing her resignation as president…

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of…

The year 2024 marks the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. In April of that year, the consummate communist, having blighted…

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House…

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late…