It happens to all people who get to the pinnacle of power—they lose perspective. The worry is that this might be what is happening to Barack Obama. Obama’s election to…
There is a scene in the futuristic fiction film by George Lucas, THX1138, in which Robert Duval, as the title character, enters a sort of phone booth in which there…
Random ruminations on a sort of lunacy I can just see myself, four decades younger, in what I fancy as my Greek God Period (actually I was lying on the…
One way of falling in love with China is first to fall in love with a Chinese woman. That is how it happened to Englishman Joseph Needham. It can happen…
a review of Revolutionary Road and the Cinema of Suburbia Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy…
Again, yesterday it was announced in the news that an American drone predator had killed several Pakistani civilians along with some Al Qaeda insurgents. The ratio is the subject of…
Several years ago I was on a bus traveling through the West Bank of Palestine. As we passed through the ancient city of Hebron, a holy place to both Muslims…
There is a joke I heard many years ago. I’m not sure I remember it exactly, but it goes like this: Back in the days of marauding hordes a village…
Some guy with a name composed of left over Scrabble letters (no vowels) from one of those Balkan states composed of a few hundred pissed-off people who are still arguing…
When I first encountered Beijing the year after Tiananmen Square the streets still jingled with bicycle bells and he soft whirr of the chains of Flying Pigeon bicycles and the…