My Metropolitan Diary

Dear Diary, This summer, I was reading my book on the steps in Union Square when one of the chess teachers came up and made me smell his cup of “tea.”  I’m pretty sure it was just gin. Dear Diary, One winter I was in the playground with my friends, and we wanted to make [...]

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A List in Response to a News: Ladies’ Specials? That’s What She Said!!!!

In an effort to make travel safer and more pleasant for women, several new commuter trains in India are for women only. Other Places I would Like To Be Only For Women 1. The women’s bathroom at the movie theater on 68th street last night.   That was really weird. The end. xoxo Gossip Girl [...]

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Kristol and the Uses of Religion

In my previous posting, I noted that Irving Kristol had a utilitarian attitude towards religion, viewing it as a necessary instrument of social control. For readers who might want more detail, I recommend this review of Kristol’s book Neoconservatism by Steve Vieux in New Politics.

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Irving Kristol, RIP

Irving Kristol died yesterday and I’ve been wrestling with the issue of whether I should write a note on his passing or not. When a political adversary leaves the scene, I’m inclined to follow the principal of “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” (of the dead, speak no ill). The passing of William Buckley, who had [...]

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A List in Response To A News: Take My Cats, Please. Seriously. I’m Going to Freak Out.

What’s that you say?  A cat lady on the Upper West Side?  How weird. My Cats or My Future Baby? Barf on the floor Poop on the floor Pee on the floor Has a brain larger than a handful of grapes Sleep on my mom’s nice chairs so that I keep getting up with what [...]

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Great Moments in Selective Quotation

Not too many years ago, Andrew Roberts was a respected historian. He specialized in a very old fashioned sort of history, writing sympathetic biographies of conservative British bigwigs like Lord Halifax and Lord Salisbury. However conventional they might be, these volumes were based on original archival research and graced by a fluid prose style. The Salisbury [...]

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Banner image: John Sell Cotman

Though few members of the public give much thought to ranking the prestige of different art forms, if forced to do so it is likely that watercolour painting would be granted an affectionate but decidedly second-tier status. We think of pretty landscapes formed with washed-out pigments: light browns, greens, yellows, pinks and reds that tend [...]

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Large and In Charge

Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes: Recently, Glamour magazine ran this photo in an article promoting healthy body image. The majority of the online responses were positive, and even my male friend Baker commented on her nice smile and other weird, irrelevant things like that.  But my first thought when I saw it was “What is the dealie [...]

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It came from the desert, part deux

Readers of the Globe and Mail will already have seen today’s front-page-above-the-fold article on diplomat Robert Fowler’s return to Canada and his interview on national TV about his abduction last year by a splinter group of AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — itself a splinter group of the Algerian insurgency of the 1990s), [...]

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The plausible deniability of M.I.A.

Daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, witness to civil war, refugee, pioneer of “global ghetto funk”, outspoken creator of a politically-charged debut album and of an even more creative follow-up album that she recorded in locations around the world after being denied a visa to work in the U.S. — a rebel’s badge of honour if [...]

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