Fight club
For those who believe history is cyclical and teaches that warlike periods cannot be averted, even in ostensibly enlightened times, [...]
“City of Miracles”
In Rome of a previous era, I once shared an apartment with a woman who said she acted on orders [...]
A history of enmity
President Donald Trump's nasty dressing-down of his Ukrainian counterpart may owe at least some of its origin to a man not even in the room, former President Joe Biden.
Upheavalism
The postwar world order is definitively over, at least in the West. Donald Trump and his minions of upheavalists — [...]
Minus Rapture
Inventor-turned-wrecking ball Elon Musk is a sick man. This he may not even know, since zeal can sit atop a [...]
Too close for comfort
An author who grew up in Washington, D.C., recalls watching jets and helicopters closely bunched in the gloaming sky and wondering, "What if . . . ?"
New Age dinosaurs
In a clever but ominous piece of reporting, London’s Financial Times suggested that by the year 2100, the wine regions [...]
Waiting for the barbarians
In 1992, historian and biographer William Manchester published a powerful, if brief, popular history of medieval Europe and how a [...]
Joe and Elon
Those who consider the wrecking ball duo of Donald Trump and Elon Musk a new and dystopian development in American [...]
So help me God
Italy long ago backed away from Catholicism as its state religion, but the faith remains fundamentally important, even in the [...]
Before New Orleans
In the poker game of psychological warfare on which terrorism depends, the September 11 plotters cleaned out the house. In [...]
Protect and kill
One of the most durable phrases in the Pentagon’s Vietnam War–era arsenal of euphemisms consisted of two words, protective reaction. [...]