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When John Bolton resigned (or was fired) a little over a week ago, the media in the US lost a recognizable, well-branded, political and ideological mustache. President Donald Trump has now replaced his media-friendly, saber-rattling, “give me war or give me death (i.e., fire me)” national...
Perhaps the most surprising news story of the past week was Politico’s revelation that Israel had successfully planted cellphone surveillance devices in strategic locations close to the White House. The purpose was to monitor the thinking and decision-making of US President Donald Trump, despite...
The crisis of civilization that now affects the United States has little to do with the largely abstract public debate about capitalism vs socialism or big government vs individual freedom, and even less to do with the traditional (but largely illusory) war between Democrats and Republicans. The...
A few decades ago, Oskar Lafontaine, a leading German Social Democrat, published a book with the somewhat unsettling, if not apparently outright weird, title: “Fear of Friends” (“Angst vor den Freunden”). The year was 1983, and the occasion the impending deployment of American...
On the program “The View,” the battle of the consequential blondes took place between Pamela Anderson — the former ultra-sexy star of the TV program “Baywatch” and a close friend of Julian Assange — and Meghan McCain. McCain owes her celebrity to her greatest accomplishment, humbly...
John Bolton, famous for wanting to invade, bomb or nuke every nation whose policies he didn’t approve of, and known for wishing to spare the United Nations only because its headquarters is located in Manhattan, has left the White House. He is no longer Donald Trump’s national security adviser....
Conventional wisdom sees literature as an author’s imaginative attempt to reflect the world. “Art imitates life” goes the saying. On certain occasions, reporters of the news, surprised by the stories they cover, speak about life imitating art or history aping literature. Great literary...
Cradled in the midst of all that is wrong with Trump and his silent and venal Republican accomplices is more hypocrisy than one article could ever capture. But I am going to try. To hit the ground running, racism is a good place to start. I haven’t found anyone who claims to be both a...
Doesn’t idiocy ever take a vacation? As August wound down, the populist troika of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro proved once again that the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil would be better off with no leaders rather than the dubious characters that currently pretend...
The New York Times has its own version of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary, glossing words or expressions that appear in the news cycle. They call it “The Interpreter.” Consistent with the newspaper of reference’s heavily marketed image of “gray” seriousness, it is more angel than...
When Steve Bannon left the Trump administration in 2017 after having established the new dogma of “America First,” few assumed that his new vocation would be to convert Europe to his doctrine. No one expected an opportunist who had dallied with the movie industry and alt-right journalism at...
