Joseph Epstein is an essayist, short story writer, and former editor of The American Scholar who was one of The Weekly Standard's most prolific contributors. He wrote extensively for the magazine from its founding in 1995 through 2018, producing over 300 essays on culture, manners, language, and the life of the mind. Known for his witty, erudite personal essays, he is widely regarded as one of the foremost American essayists of his generation.
The story goes that the head writer on The Simpsons television show walked into a meeting one morning, two small band-aids on the same cheek, another on his neck under his chin. “What kind of a country is this?” he exclaimed. “They can kill all the Kennedys, but they can’t make a decent razor…
Joseph Epstein on Marcel Proust among the grand women of the belle époque.
Neologisms, words newly coined, are as necessary to language as water to land. New inventions, institutions, patterns of behavior require new words to describe them. Nor need all neologisms describe new phenomena. Some are required to cover long-established phenomena that have called out for but…
Charm makes the world seem a more enticing place—but it is going the way of chivalry, good manners, and unmotivated kindness.
When the future becomes more finite.
Joseph Epstein on verbal inanity .
Joseph Epstein on profanity.
Joseph Epstein on the scandal that ended the tennis great’s career—and the challenge it creates for biographers.
Tom Wolfe was death on intellectual pretension, and he mocked those who always sought out the worst in America.
Joseph Epstein's neighborhood.
I have never had, nor felt the need of having, a hobby. When I was a kid, friends of mine collected stamps or miniature cars or made model airplanes. I did none of these things. When I was 11 or 12, a shop moved into our neighborhood called Hobby Models, catering to hobbyists of all sorts. I found…
Ever since Michel de Montaigne noted that he couldn’t be sure whether he was playing with his cat or his cat was playing with him, an essayist without a cat has seemed like a Hasid without a hat. Or so I came to conclude a month or so after our charming calico cat Hermione died one sad evening in…
The big news out of Chicago, city of my birth and upbringing, is murder. According to a reliable website called HeyJackass!, during 2017, someone in Chicago was shot every 2 hours and 27 minutes and murdered every 12 hours and 59 minutes. There were 679 murders and 2,936 people shot in the city.…
“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” a scrap of verse by the English journalist William Norman Ewer, has over the years had many answering refrains. “Not odd, you Sod / The Jews chose God” is one; “What’s so Odd / His son was one” is another; and a third goes “This surely was no mere…
Five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday, from 1973 to 2012, Milton Rosenberg elevated AM radio and the cultural tone generally in Chicago. Milt Rosenberg died on January 9 at the age of 92. His two-hour talk show was nothing if not anomalous. A University of Chicago professor, his academic…
The other day a friend told me that my name came up at the funeral of someone I didn’t remotely know. I told her, this friend, that I assumed that the person who brought it up was doubtless the minister, priest, or rabbi officiating at the funeral. She said it was the minister. I added that I knew…
Poor David Copperfield, to add to the other humiliations of his boyhood, at school is forced, for reasons too elaborate to go into here, to wear a sign that reads, “Take Care of Him. He Bites.” I have been thinking of that sign in connection with a sign I should like to make for myself that reads:…
Twelve or so years ago I heard that well-known political scientist Jackie Mason on the subject of the political rhetoric of the day, specifically on that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In his characteristic Yiddo-staccato accent, Mason, as memory serves, said:
My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all…
My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all…
As the major league playoffs continue on into the World Series, there is lots of talk—complaining, really—about the lengthening time it takes to play, and therefore watch, a baseball game. The average time of a baseball game is now three hours and five minutes. I don’t know if the average time of a…
As the major league playoffs continue on into the World Series, there is lots of talk—complaining, really—about the lengthening time it takes to play, and therefore watch, a baseball game. The average time of a baseball game is now three hours and five minutes. I don’t know if the average time of a…
Samuel Johnson, about to tuck into a pork roast, is supposed to have said that the only thing that would make the food before him better is if he were a Jew. Stendhal, I years ago heard, said that the only thing wrong with ice cream was that it wasn’t illegal. The question both these men raise is…
If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…
If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…
A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…
A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…
I’m a man who uses a tea bag twice, and tells himself that the tea often tastes better on the second use of the bag. I go out of my way to buy gas for my car at a station where it is usually 20 to 35 cents a gallon less than at a much closer station. When I discover red grapes or tangerines at a…
I’m a man who uses a tea bag twice, and tells himself that the tea often tastes better on the second use of the bag. I go out of my way to buy gas for my car at a station where it is usually 20 to 35 cents a gallon less than at a much closer station. When I discover red grapes or tangerines at a…
"Mother,” asks 10-year-old Johnny upon returning from school, “do I have a cliché on my face?”
Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, "Not many laughs." S. J. Perelman, another writer I…
Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, "Not many laughs." S. J. Perelman, another writer I…
I don't blow but I'm a fan. Look at me swing, ring-a-ding-ding. I even call my girlfriend 'man.' . . . Every Saturday night with my suit Buttoned tight and my suedes on I'm getting my kicks digging arty French Flicks with my shades on. —"I'm Hip" lyrics by Dave Frishberg The first distinction…
I don't blow but I'm a fan. Look at me swing, ring-a-ding-ding. I even call my girlfriend 'man.' . . . Every Saturday night with my suit Buttoned tight and my suedes on I'm getting my kicks digging arty French Flicks with my shades on. —"I'm Hip" lyrics by Dave Frishberg The first distinction…
In Aristophanes' play The Knights, I came upon the following sentence, spoken by the Greek general Demosthenes to a sausage-seller whom the gods have prophesied will become the next leader of Athens: "No, political leadership's no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the…
In Aristophanes' play The Knights, I came upon the following sentence, spoken by the Greek general Demosthenes to a sausage-seller whom the gods have prophesied will become the next leader of Athens: "No, political leadership's no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the…
I'm about to do something that my eminently sensible father would have disapproved of: write a check to a politician. True, it is to be a small check, one for only $200, but its recipient, the alderwoman of the first ward in Evanston, Illinois, my ward, seems to me an exceptional person. Still,…
I'm about to do something that my eminently sensible father would have disapproved of: write a check to a politician. True, it is to be a small check, one for only $200, but its recipient, the alderwoman of the first ward in Evanston, Illinois, my ward, seems to me an exceptional person. Still,…
Last evening, at a neighborhood restaurant, I had a splendid meal, and not the least splendid thing about it was our waiter. He efficiently answered questions about the menu. He refilled our wine glasses at precisely the right moment. He paced delivery of courses—drinks, salad, entree, coffee—at…
Last evening, at a neighborhood restaurant, I had a splendid meal, and not the least splendid thing about it was our waiter. He efficiently answered questions about the menu. He refilled our wine glasses at precisely the right moment. He paced delivery of courses—drinks, salad, entree, coffee—at…
During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today,…
During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today,…
I recently sent an email to the editor of the London Times Literary Supplement complaining about his running a longish lead article by a lunatic-of-one-idea feminist who would cite misogyny as the explanation for the behavior of Lady Macbeth, Lucretia Borgia, and the Wicked Witch of the West. He…
Not to be born is best, when all is reckoned,
Not to be born is best, when all is reckoned,
John O'Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation?
John O'Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation?
Chicago
Chicago
Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one…
Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one…
Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—"vogue words," H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage—that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping…
The story is told about Degas dining at the home of his contemporary, the painter Jean Louis Forain, a 19th-century gadget freak who had one of the first telephones in Paris. Forain gleefully showed his phone to the grumpy and greatly unimpressed Degas. During the meal, the telephone rang, and…
Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—"vogue words," H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage—that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping…
In a contest for the best novels of the past four centuries, the winners, surely, are: for the 17th century, Don Quixote; for the 18th century, Tom Jones; for the 19th, War and Peace; and for the 20th, Remembrance of Things Past, or as it is now increasingly known in English, In Search of Lost…
At a local library sale, I not long ago picked up for fifty cents a clean copy of The Olympia Reader, an anthology from the Paris publishing house that in its day printed the best high-class pornography then going. Olympia Press published the Marquis de Sade, John Cleland, Pauline Réage, Frank…
With Donald Trump slipping, if not precipitously yet nonetheless seriously, in the polls, his choice of a vice-presidential candidate looms all the more important. The wrong choice could doom him, the right choice pull him up even, perhaps ahead of Hillary Clinton. As a not altogether disinterested…
I just bought a bottle of Waterman’s ink for $11.34, tax included. The bottle contains 50ml, or less than two ounces, of black ink. This makes ink far more expensive than wine, even quite superior wine. I would have complained—or at least exclaimed—about the price, but the man who sold it to me was…
I recently gave a talk at a synagogue in Miami on the subject of Jewish humor—specifically on the jokes Jews tell about themselves. Freud, in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wrote: "I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its…
The picture I couldn’t get out of my mind from that dread-filled Tuesday morning—and still can’t get out of my mind more than a week later—is the image of the second plane, turning round and flying directly into the 110-story building, setting it instantly aflame. So insane, so like a comic book,…
I first acquired a connoisseur’s interest in dull headlines in 1963, when I read, in a note in the air edition of the English New Statesman, that the London Times had staged a contest for the dullest headline to appear in the paper over the past year. The winning entry was "Small Earthquake in…
When I come upon an artist, a philosopher, a scientist, a statesman, an athlete I admire, I find myself interested in his or her background, which is to say in their biography, in the hope of discovering what in their past made possible their future eminence. I find it more than a touch difficult…
My combined roles as television couch potato and language snob have not been easy on me. What I most watch on television is sports and news, with a fair amount of DVDs, these chiefly of English detective stories. Much of this television watching is done in the evening, when, as they say about…
Ronald Syme — actually, Sir Ronald Syme — is not a household name in America, but perhaps it ought to be. Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealand-born classicist, later an Oxford don, who is in many quarters regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome. He wrote a biography of Sallust and a…
For a man who delved into the lives of others, not all that much is known about the life of Cornelius Tacitus, historian of Rome under the empire. He was born in 56 or 57 a.d. and is thought to have died around 125 a.d. His family came from Narbonensis (the modern Provence), or possibly from…
Christmas these days is signaled not by the music played in shops and the wreaths hung along lampposts, but by the increasingly heavy load of catalogues that begin arriving in the mail late in October. Pity the poor mailman, having to lug such stuff around. These catalogues give recycling a bad…
I taught at a university for 30 years, from 1973 until 2002. The timing of my departure was exquisite. I left before smartphones became endemic and political correctness, with triggering and microaggressions and the rest, kicked in. The courses I taught—in Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather,…
I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture. Notes Toward the Definition of Culture —T. S. Eliot My friend Hilton Kramer, the art critic of…
In 1991 I wrote an essay for the American Scholar called “The Ignorant Man’s Guide to Serious Music,” in which I was both the ignorant man and the guide. The essay was about my love for classical music and my hopeless inability to get beyond the stage of a coarse admiration of it. Midway through…
In 2008, at the age of 27, Roger Federer had finished his fourth consecutive year as the number-one ranked tennis player in the world, already won 13 Grand Slam tournaments, and made most of his opponents look as if they had come to play against him with a cricket bat instead of a tennis racquet.…
From my living-room windows, I can see two of the three coffee shops within a block of our apartment. Within less than a mile, there are five other coffee shops. In America the coffee shop has for the most part replaced the neighborhood bar, the country club, it used to be said, of the working man.…
Roughly four years ago I reported on the acquisition of a calico kitten named Hermione. I began by writing that she was asleep in my inbox. Now four years later, too large for my inbox, she sleeps in the chair next to mine in the room in our apartment I call my office. I ended my earlier scribble…
Philosophers, held Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), are of two kinds: didactic and contemplative. The former tend to have minds that gravitate to the formation of bold and graspable ideas, the latter to thoughts less readily summarized. Aristotle’s golden mean, Descartes’s cogito, Kant’s categorical…
Our virtues lose themselves in selfishness as rivers are lost in the sea. —La Rochefoucauld If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016 she will not only be the nation’s first woman president but our second affirmative-action president. By affirmative-action president I mean that she, like…
I have an issue with issue—with the word, that is. It pops up everywhere, meaning everything and meaning nothing. One hears of a pitcher who has rotator-cuff issues, of a landlord who has issues with pets in his buildings, of a bill up before Congress that poses jurisdictional issues. A weather…
Difficult, they say, to pass a family business on to the third generation. Proof of this assertion is the business known as the City of Chicago, run by the Daley family for two generations but now turned over to non-Irish carpetbaggers, with no future Daley in view. In the interregnum between Daley…
This past week I decided to change living arrangements chez Epstein. I turned my office into a den and our spare bedroom into an office. Sounds simple enough. I soon realized that I would have to hire professional movers to lug a couch, a weighty television set, and several bookcases and a few file…
I once appeared on a panel at the National Endowment for the Humanities with two women who talked about the importance of their secondary education. One was German and spoke reverently of the gymnasium she was fortunate enough to attend. The other, an American, spent her adolescence in France and…
Herodotus, the first Greek and thereby the first Western historian, had bad press long before there was anything resembling a press. Aristotle referred to him as a “story-teller,” which was no honorific. What he meant was that Herodotus made things up, another word for which is “liar.” Thucydides…
Sometime in mid-February, after the long winter, baseball fans are delighted to read, usually over a two-paragraph-long story buried beneath the fold in the sports pages, the tag line Pitchers and Catchers Report. They are reporting, of course, to spring training two or three weeks ahead of the…
This morning I was reading along in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s remarkable novel The Five, when I came to a chapter titled “Inserted Chapter, Not Intended for the Reader.” The chapter, it turns out, is about nature writing. Jabotinsky’s narrator, a writer, notes that a critic remarked on the absence of…
In past years I have taken to print to attack two words—focus and icon—that drove me bonkers. Focus, a metaphor from the world of cameras and microscopes, replaced the words concentrate and emphasize. Suddenly everywhere ballplayers lost their focus, students were encouraged to find theirs,…
Of late, the last four years or so, I rarely go out for long without being praised. I am praised not for my writing, my perspicacity, my elegant bearing, my youthful good looks, my extreme modesty, but for my eyeglasses. “Nice glasses,” strangers say to me. “Like your glasses,” they say. “Love…
T.S. Eliot thought that the first requisite for being a literary critic is to be very intelligent. The second, I should say, is to have a well-stocked mind, which means having knowledge of literatures and literary traditions other than that into which one was born; possessing several languages; and…
I'm pleased to report that I’ve just returned from the Evanston Public Library saleroom empty-handed. The saleroom is off the main lobby and contains used books, donated to the library, which sell for a mere 50 cents. Not all the books in the saleroom are serious—junky novels predominate—but a fair…
The great American fraud that dare not speak its name, though anyone who owns a television set is aware of it, is college athletics. Amateur though they are supposed to be, the only thing truly amateur about them is that they do not pay the (supposed) students who play them, at least not directly.
Men, it is said, do not like to go to doctors. Clearly I qualify here. I have long considered myself a Christian Scientist, minus the Christian part. A realist in my taste in fiction, I am a fantasist in my views about physiology. I prefer, that is, to pretend that I do not have such organs as a…
The Nobel Prize in Medicine has already been given for this year, but I should like to get a jump on next year’s prize by describing and naming a mental condition from which untold millions suffer. The condition is not anything so devastating as dementia. Most people who have it manage to work…
This isn’t going to be a good week for me. Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of the death in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy, and between now and then I expect a complete media blitz—make that a blitzkrieg—of stories, films, docudramas, book reviews, and counterfactual explorations about…
A reunion marking the hundredth anniversary of the founding of my high school—Nicholas Senn, on the northside of Chicago—is to be held this month, and I shall not be attending it. I am one of those people who had a good run in high school. A minor athlete, a member of most of the school’s better…
The best writing in newspapers, it used to be said, was in the sports pages. Variously known as the toy department or the playpen or the peanut stand, its interest restricted to matters of supreme inconsequence, the sports pages allowed the people who filled them more latitude for the prose…
Cell phones today in America are of course endemic, if not epidemic. On one of the thoroughfares in the youthful neighborhood in which I live, I can sometimes walk an entire block without passing anyone not on or gazing down at or thumb-pumping his or her cell phone. Everyone has seen three or four…
'Two Jews, each with a parrot on his shoulder, are in front of a synagogue,” Hyman Ginsburg begins to tell his friend Irv Schwartz, when the latter interrupts.
A succès de scandale if ever there was one, Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s fourth book of fiction, will soon be 45 years old. At the center of the novel’s scandalousness, which recounts the 33-year-old Alexander Portnoy’s reporting to his psychoanalyst the emergence of his repressed desires…
Fifty or so yards from the apartment building in which I live a new restaurant has recently opened called Found Kitchen and Social House. It’s doing land-office business: Lines of people awaiting tables gather in the foyer, its bar stools are perpetually filled, hustling valet car-parkers are kept…
I was watching the Chicago Blackhawks play the Los Angeles Kings in the western Stanley Cup final round when, in the second period, the television camera panned to Tom Cruise, sitting alone in a rink-side seat. “Tom Cruise is a big Kings fan,” the announcer said.
Nonfiction is a baggy-pants term, in whose bulging pockets one finds autobiography, memoir, the essay, literary journalism, and book-length studies of ideas, trends, and much else. The only thing these various forms have in common is that all are written in prose and are based, supposedly, on fact.
I was not long ago introduced before giving a talk by a woman who, to authenticate my importance, said that she had Googled my name and found more than 12 million results. She didn’t, thank goodness, go on to say what some of these results were. If she had, she might have mentioned that a few years…
A year or so ago, I took part in a conference in Mexico for which I, along with several other intellectuals, academics, and writers, was paid an excellent fee to talk for 10 minutes. The proceedings took place over three days. They were held in a movie-sized theater and were well attended. I was…
At a celebration at UCLA of the career of Eugen Weber, the Romanian-born historian of France, I made the mistake of describing Eugen as an exile. In his response to the tributes paid him, Eugen corrected me, remarking that he had never considered himself an exile. “From the moment I attained…
An old journalistic axiom holds, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This means that stories of violence—of murder and arson, tornadoes and hurricanes, floods and carnage—always get primary attention in newspapers and on radio and television news. They still do, but coming up fast on the outside, especially…
I'm a sucker for a cheap subscription. For years I subscribed to Vanity Fair because I was able to get it for $1 a month. I paged through each thick issue, gazing upon countless pages of advertising for gaudy watches, men’s colognes, hideous Italian suits, and other merchandise I should not care to…
Of the making of books, Ecclesiastes informs us, there is no end. But of some books, perhaps, there should never have been a beginning. One such book, or so many believed when it first appeared, was Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. When published in…
Academics, I’m told, used to play a game at parties in which each person confessed to some great work he or she should have but never got around to reading. Stakes in this game rose quickly. One might begin by allowing one has never read The Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione and, a few drinks on,…
When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving Kristol is said to have replied, “They’re over,” adding, “We lost.” If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that war may have been over the liberal arts in education, which we also lost.
When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving Kristol is said to have replied, “They’re over,” adding, “We lost.” If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that war may have been over the liberal arts in education, which we also lost.
When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving Kristol is said to have replied, “They’re over,” adding, “We lost.” If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that war may have been over the liberal arts in education, which we also lost.
I spent a good part of the last three weeks helping a young friend look for an apartment, and the experience was revealing. Among other things, it made me realize that so much has changed in the city where I grew up and have lived most of my life that I scarcely know it. The experience also showed…
Five or six years ago I found the seats at classical music concerts becoming uncomfortable. I blame the seats, but in fact I had lost the Sitzfleisch—in German literally “seat meat,” in looser translation “bottom patience” —to sit through a concert. In concert halls my mind wandered, I counted the…
A philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who happens to like Jews.
No greater fantasts exist than writers, who are able to bring an extra dollop or two of imagination to their unreality. About no subject are they more fantastic than the potential commercial success of their books. When I publish a book with the least chance of popular appeal, I am unable, even…
In Lucking Out, one learns that its author is a man of humble origins. He was born, he reports, into a drab working-class family in Baltimore: “socially corner-pocketed,” as he puts it in one of the many phrases he avails himself of that have more flair than precision, “and Beauty deprived.” He…
I knew a man who allowed his wife to buy the family car, a fact that always astonished me, and still does. Dealing with car salesmen, if I may say so and still elude the charge of sexism, is man’s work. Only men can be so stupid as to get caught up in the hopeless game of trying to defeat car…
The New Yorker, like New York itself, is always better in the past. In the present, it seems always to be slipping, never quite as good as it once was. Did the magazine, founded in 1925, have a true heyday? People differ about when this might be. The New Yorker’s heyday, it frequently turns out,…
The other day I asked my five-years-younger-than-I brother—the wit in our family—if he had taken to using a Kindle. “My Kindle,” he said, “is at the cleaners.” I’m not sure why I found that funny, but I did, and still do, and take it that he means he would never think of using this new aid to…
Steve Jobs, as everyone knows, died last week at 56.
Time to declare a moratorium on the high five. That combination salute and handshake has been around for more than 30 years, and is now entering the stage of the perfunctory, perhaps even the otiose. The other evening, watching a White Sox game, I saw a player hit by a pitch replaced by a…
When Marilyn Monroe divorced Joe DiMaggio, Oscar Levant remarked that it only went to show that no man can be expected to excel at two national pastimes. Time can do terrible things, even to wit, and this superior mot now has a slight flaw, which is that it is no longer clear that baseball is…
At English department parties of many moons past, or so I have been told, once all had become properly snockered, a popular game commenced in which everyone confessed to what he or she hadn’t read. The game had a crescendo quality as the intellectual stakes rose. “I’ve never read Christopher…
By the time you read this, Katie Couric will no longer be the anchorwoman on the CBS Evening News. She could not do what she was paid $15 million a year to do: bring up the ratings for CBS prime-time news and with them its advertising revenues. Both fell further during her tenure. While advertising…
Tourism, it has been said, is a condition of moral rest. On a recent trip to New York—where I was lent a two-room time-share apartment on 56th Street across from Carnegie Hall—I invoked this maxim time and again. I ate what I pleased, saw what I wished, did no work of any substance, and achieved…
In Chicago elections one’s antipathies are always nicely divided. The division is usually between idealistic incompetence and corrupt quasi-competence. Corrupt quasi-competence, the way of the Daley dynasty, père et fils, for better and worse generally wins the day. The result has been that the…
My friend John Gross died on Monday, January 10. His son Tom, who sent out an email announcing John’s death to a large number of his friends, noted that his father’s death was caused by complications relating to his heart and kidneys. His health had been failing in various ways for quite a long…
Robert Benchley said that the world is divided between those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t. I am one of those who do, and would like to present a fresh such division. Here the little darling is: The world is divided between people who believe that what is most…
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Is some food, in one of the leading cant phrases of our day, sexist? Food cannot of course take political positions, but some food, let us agree, has a greater masculine than feminine appeal, and probably always will. Try as I might, I cannot imagine the Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher…
I am about to publish a new book—egads, my twenty-first, which surely qualifies me as a graphomaniac—and the other day 25 so-called author’s copies arrived. The thrill of holding the artifact, the physical object that is the palpable result of one’s lucubrations, in one’s hand is still there. So is…
Much of my education, such as it is, is owing to intellectual journalism. I first discovered the intellectual journals—Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Dissent, Encounter, and others—in my wanderings in the periodical room of William Rainey Harper Library in my junior year at the…
A few years ago, reading along in Katherine Graham’s soppy autobiography, I came across a sentence that mentioned that the author’s father, Eugene Meyer, had accumulated a fortune of 30—or was it 40?—million dollars while still a young man. I smacked my palm against my forehead. “Damn,” I…
Irving Thalberg
Where else would Sarah Palin, or for that matter any other politician, entertainer, or criminal copping a plea in public go for the ultimate publicity fix?
I see where my old friend Archie Andrews has got his rear-end in a sling. Seems he married the wrong girl, the sleek and wealthy, raven-haired Veronica Lodge, when most people were hoping that he would eventually wind up with the very blonde though less than bombshell Betty Cooper, the girl--or at…
As the last of the New York intellectuals depart the planet, it becomes apparent that Irving Kristol, who published less than most of them, had a wider and deeper influence on his time than all of them. Just how and why is not all that clear, but it is so. Nor is it clear how best to describe…
In an idle moment in an otherwise indolent life, I recently counted my neckties. I have, I am slightly embarrassed to report, 86 of them, some purchased as long ago as the late 1970s. The preponderance are bow ties, though I've bought a few brightly colored knit four-in-hand ties in recent years…
Maurice Bowra
I was up three mornings in a row last week and at my post--a comfortable chair next to a lamp table upon which my coffee sat--watching the semifinal and final matches at Wimbledon. Tennis is the sport I played best as a boy and, when played well, the sport I enjoy watching above all others. Nothing…
When I was 11 years old, my parents bought a two-flat apartment building. The building had a small front and back lawn, the care of which was turned over to me. I was no more than 10 minutes on the job when I found it even more boring than hearing about your children's high SAT scores. I rushed…
The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot
In the April 1966 issue of Esquire, Gay Talese published a famous article called "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." All I remember of the article is its moral: which was that, when Frank Sinatra has a cold, the world had better stand by with plenty of Kleenex.
Outliers
Returning from Palo Alto a few weeks ago, as our plane was about to land at O'Hare, I gazed down at the gray, snow-covered landing field, and braced myself for more of the grim gulagian Chicago winter. The weather in northern California had been in the mid-60s, the skies unfailingly blue and sunny,…
Early on the evening of November 25, I was met at the reception desk of WTTW, the PBS station in Chicago, by a pretty intern named Jennifer. She led me to what passes for the station's green room, a handsome conference room with a plasma television set playing along the far wall. I was left to…
Nothing To Be Frightened Of
Last week the excellent David Brooks, in one of his columns in the New York Times, exulted over the high quality of people President-elect Barack Obama was enlisting in his new cabinet and onto his staff. The chief evidence for these people being so impressive, it turns out, is they all went to…
The MacArthur Fellowships were announced some weeks back, and, for the twenty-seventh year in a row, I did not win one. I could have used the half-million dollars, payable at a rate of $100,000 a year, no doubt about that, but I also find I can live without it. At least no one I loathe won; the…
The liberal women I know--and most of the women I seem to know are liberal--loathe Sarah Palin. They don't merely dislike her, the way one tends to dislike politicians whose views are not one's own, they actively detest her. When her name comes up--and it is they who tend to bring it up--their…
Patronizing the Arts
Earlier this summer, I was discovered to have a basal carcinoma, which sounds terrifying, but is in fact merely a precancerous sore that was easily cut away by a dermatologist. The sore was at my hairline--wasn't it William James who said of Josiah Royce that he showed "an indecent exposure of…
The Evanston Public Library has a small room devoted to sale books, some donated by patrons, others removed from their shelves because of continuous neglect by readers. I no longer collect books, but old habits die hard, and so I pop in every so often to see if there isn't some neglected book that…
I recently went to a new physician, a dermatologist, for a minor problem, but before seeing her, I had to fill out a longish form setting out my and my parents' medical history. All went smoothly enough until the very last question, which asked about my hobbies. I was frankly stumped. I have no…
In America we are currently living in a Kindergarchy, under rule by children. People who are raising, or have recently raised, or have even been around children a fair amount in recent years will, I think, immediately sense what I have in mind. Children have gone from background to foreground…
Northwestern, the university where I taught for 30 years, appears to have caught its nether parts in a wringer. It seems they approached the Reverend Jeremiah Wright about accepting an honorary degree, and, now that Wright has made clear the kind of clergyman he is, Northwestern has withdrawn its…
Every man, they say, has his price, and I believe I may now have established mine. In fact, I seem to be establishing and reestablishing my price almost daily.
A friend of mine, a highly intelligent lawyer with an interest in human nature, not long ago asked me if I knew any men given over in a serious way to chasing women. When I said I did, he asked if I'd ever noticed that, at the end of a lifetime of doing so, these men seemed to have no regrets? I…
Bernard Malamud
You live, they say (usually accompanied by a sigh), and you learn. They say it; I don't. You live, I say (with an even deeper sigh), and you yearn. And I generally make it a point to yearn for things that I am certain to be unable to obtain. What's the point of yearning for the merely possible? "I…
Many years ago I gave the Mencken Day lecture at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. After my lecture, a man in his late seventies, possibly early eighties, came up to tell me that he knew H.L. Mencken. He then drew out of a battered briefcase a small light brown frame, in which, tapped out…
Lions at Lamb House
My 10-year-old grandson Nick is in town for a month or so this summer, and I wanted to give him a gift. As with many middle-class kids his age, his play is almost entirely electronified--Wii-ed, XBoxed, and computerfied--and I haven't a clue as to what he might still want in this high-tech line.…
The Grand Surprise
A pessimist is a man who doesn't check his mail. I, an optimist, approach my mailbox each morning light of heart and with hope in my step. I also click on my email twelve or fifteen times a day. What, exactly, am I looking for? In a word: offers. I check mail and email in anticipation of offers…
Ralph Ellison
Sentimental, depressive, ghoulish, call it what you like, I happen to enjoy, every few months, a quiet half hour or so at the cemetery. My cemetery of choice is called Westlawn, where my parents are buried. Westlawn is in the dullish suburb of Norridge, northwest of Chicago, on Montrose Avenue,…
Every generation in America grows up with its own singer or singing group. Elvis is perhaps the most notable example. All sorts of men and women now in their early and middle sixties still vibrate to his hit songs of the late fifties and early sixties. For those who came a bit after, it was The…
The magazine Edge, on its tenth anniversary, recently asked a number of scientists and thinkers what they found in the world or in their particular lines of interest to be optimistic about. I'm pleased to say that I was not asked. I am of course not a scientist, but I might, just possibly, have…
Seventy. Odd thing to happen to a five-year-old boy who, only the other day, sang "Any Bonds Today," whose mother's friends said he would be a heartbreaker for sure (he wasn't), who was popular but otherwise undistinguished in high school, who went on to the University of Chicago but long ago…
When George W. Bush addresses the nation with his Iraq proposals in early January, a great many people will be disappointed. They will be so because the president is unlikely to change the position he has held all along: that in Iraq victory, or something that looks to the world like victory, is…
Roughly three months ago, I resolved to stop swearing. Not that I used profanity relentlessly, but I had begun to notice that I was availing myself of it more and more--and doing so in situations where I used to be more restrained: among what used to be called mixed company.
I like to think that I am the only heterosexual non-transvestite man in America who put on makeup not once but twice this past Thursday. The reason I did was that I appeared on two different television shows in Chicago for the purpose of flogging a new book. I love that word, "flog," even though it…
Sometime earlier this year the New Leader magazine, after 82 years in business, ceased publication. Not all that many people could have known of the magazine during its existence. The tag line in a full-page ad that it once ran in the New York Times Book Review seeking new subscribers, as I…
A friend told me he discovered on eBay that someone is selling my signature, asking the odd price of $129. The signature itself appears on a plain postcard containing a stamp with a picture of Rachel Carson. Not an eBayista myself, I have no way of knowing if the seller ever got anywhere near the…
I HAD MY FIRST BICYCLE when I was eleven, and it was a disappointment. Schwinn seemed the only bike worth having in those days. My father, for some reason, surprised me by bringing home an off-brand bike called a SunRacer. Red and white, it had nothing wrong with it, but it wasn't a Schwinn. I soon…
AT LUNCH THE OTHER DAY, someone asked me what I thought about The Charlie Rose Show. I answered that I didn't think anything about it, because by the time it comes on in Chicago I'm usually waking up for the first time. I appear to be entering the stage in life where sleep is topic number one for…
THE FIRST CELL PHONE JOKE I ever heard was in fact about car phones. Sophie Ginsberg calls her friend Sylvia Glick from her Mercedes to tell her that she has just acquired a car phone and what a marvelous convenience it is! To keep up with her friend, Sylvia persuades her husband to provide her…
I SEEM TO HAVE WRITTEN another book, my eighteenth. I'm gratified that the ecologists haven't thus far come after me for destroying so many trees. The most ambiguous compliment a writer can receive is to be told that he or she is prolific. I fear that I may be getting prolific, if I'm not already…
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what is plagiarism? The least sincere form? A genuine crime? Or merely the work of someone with less-than-complete mastery of quotation marks who is in too great a hurry to come up with words and ideas of his own?
The Man Everybody Knew
FELLOW NAME OF PRUFROCK used to measure his life in coffee spoons, but I am beginning to measure mine in favorite old restaurants that go out of business. Another such establishment, The Berghoff in Chicago, bit the dust a couple of weeks ago. It had been in existence for 107 years, and now the…
THE SIGN, in red letters on a yellow awning, reading "Moe's Maxwell Street Polish" caught my eye as I drove past. I remember the smell of those Polish sausages, and especially of the onions, grilling on a winter's day on Maxwell Street, the old peddler's open-air market in the Chicago of my…
IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, I had a phone call from a man who identified himself as Maurice Rosenfield. He claimed he had been reading me in magazines for years, said that he had an option on F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and asked if I would mind reading a manuscript he…
A PITY THAT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE didn't wait 15 years or so, after baseball had been invented, to visit America. Much impressed as the penetrating Frenchman was by what he termed America's penchant for "voluntary associations," he would have been at first utterly baffled by that looniest of all…
CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it's spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without…
I HAVE BEEN READING, with immense pleasure, the first four volumes of The Letters of George Santayana in the handsome edition published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. I read them with my first cup of tea before breakfast, usually in short takes, between ten and twenty pages at…
The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…
THE OTHER DAY, ON C-SPAN, I saw Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual, giving a talk plugging one of his books at a Barnes & Noble. Monsieur Lévy is a man with a vivid face, including a nose that doesn't disappoint, high coloring, and a small mouth worth watching. Yet I soon found my mind…
SOME OF US LOOK AT the big picture and some of us, unfortunately, do not. I have myself only recently begun to look at the big picture. And by big picture I mean a picture 42" diagonally across. In plainer words, I just purchased a new large-screen plasma television set, and the size and perfection…
AS IS ITS RELENTLESS WONT, the New York Times has brought me bad news, but not just bad news about the world, its standard fare, but about my own life. In a recent Sunday Styles section, the newspaper announced that jokes, formal jokes, with a beginning-middle-and-end structure, are out. "It's a…
I'VE READ THAT SOMETHING LIKE 80 percent of the people eligible for rebates on purchases of new appliances, computers, even automobiles, faced with the irritating paperwork involved in collecting the money, adapt what are supposed to have been W.C. Fields's deathbed words and say, On second…
Faculty Towers
ORCHIDS LOOK TO BECOME MY next obsession. I do not, I think, qualify as a truly obsessive personality, but I do like to have an obsession going from time to time. For a while I was obsessed with finding the perfect fountain pen, which I believe I've now found. Books were a more enduring obsession,…
I REMEMBER THE HEFT OF the envelope, the thick creamy paper, the name Coudert Bros. printed in the upper left-hand corner. Letters from law firms do not necessarily bring good news; and the very French-sounding name of this one made me think that perhaps someone from the Balzac estate, catching me…
IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-century medical encyclopedias, the article "The Secret Vice" was about onanism. Inevitably accompanying the article was a photograph of a practitioner, a young man, poor fellow, who looked to be in the moral equivalent of advanced leprosy.
"FRED IS DEAD," read the note my wife left on the small table in our front hall on which we leave each other messages. Fred was Fred Austin, our mailman for the better part of the past fifteen years. Three days before I had put a twenty in his hand, as I do every year, instructing him to have a…
CONSERVATIVES COME IN MANY STRIPES and various hues. There are the paleoconservatives (the guys who want to get the cars off the streets but haven't yet found an efficient way to deal with the horse manure once they've done so) and the neoconservatives (those former liberals famously mugged by…
Too Brief a Treat
A man after my own heart, Peter Kramer of Hillsborough, North Carolina, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review questioning the novelist Philip Roth for describing George W. Bush as "a man unfit to run a hardware store." Mr. Kramer's point is that Roth could not have chosen a…
I WAS IN NORDSTROM, buying a black blazer. My salesman was a genial man in his forties, bald and plumpish, carefully turned-out. Good at what he did, not pushing in any way, he smoothly played along with my desire to be taken as a man of the world. Our transaction complete, he gave me his business…
Collected Stories
THIS MORNING, out for my regular constitutional, I was called Adolf and accused of being a Nazi by a man with long orangish hair carrying a purse. I saw him coming down the block, and I nodded to him, for he had turned up some months ago at a book promotion talk I gave at a nearby Borders. During…
YESTERDAY, to avoid the long lines, I used the recently installed automated system and checked myself out of my local supermarket: two pints of Häagen-Dazs frozen coffee yogurt, three rolls of white necessary paper, a package of six Bays English muffins, a small bag of vine-ripened tomatoes.…
"READING AT RISK" is one of those hardy perennials, a government survey telling us that in some vital area--obesity, pollution, fuel depletion, quality of education, domestic relations--things are even worse than we thought. In the category of literacy, the old surveys seemed always to be some…
The Master
AS I STEPPED OUT into the street after a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the other evening, it occurred to me that there have been three distinct changes in the urban landscape over the past quarter century: the end of indoor smoking at all but a small number of public places, forcing…
Flesh in the Age of Reason
LAST SATURDAY I saw a movie so inept, so stupid, so generally and particularly wrong that I felt justified in not having paid much attention to movies over the past decade or so, but it also gave the peculiar kind of pleasure that only a genuinely bad movie can sometimes give. The movie is called…
IN HIS POEM "Esthétique du Mal," Wallace Stevens speaks of "the lunatic of one idea." Melvin J. Lasky might be thought such a person. He had the energy of a lunatic, and, though widely read and interested in everything, he could nonetheless be described a "one idea" man.
MY CUBS TICKETS HAVE ARRIVED. Seven sets of two tickets each. And what seats: eight rows off the field, on the first-base side, right at the visiting team's on-deck circle. I buy them from a friend who has held Cubs season tickets through three marriages. He could get more for my seats by selling…
I Recently Received An Invitation to my fiftieth-year high school reunion, and am impressed with how little interested I am in attending it. For many people, their adolescence was an awkward, painful, really hellacious time. Mine, on the contrary, was so pleasing that I sometimes think that I…
WHENEVER ANYONE under the age of 50 sees old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds--in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland--seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora…
Lessons of the Masters
NATURE ISN'T, as they used to say in the 1960s, my bag. I've known this for some time but realized it afresh recently when, on a non-matrimonial trip to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, I found myself not unimpressed--no one could ever be that--but a bit repelled by the scene before me. Niagara…
Diaspora
THE OTHER DAY I was signing a few books, after a talk I gave at a women's club in Chicago, when someone remarked on the weather, and a very nice woman cited Mark Twain as saying, "It's heaven for climate, it's hell for company." I hesitated, then remarked, "Forgive me, but Mark Twain wasn't the…
I WAS READING ALONG in a library copy of C.S. Lewis's book "The Four Loves," which, to my mild chagrin, had been underlined and sidelined by various earlier readers using different markers: both fine and soft pencils and a ballpoint pen. I'm afraid that the writing of Lewis, a wise man whose style…
I AM A PAID SUBSCRIBER to Vanity Fair, Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly, and Details. I'm a sucker for fat, slick-paper magazines that go for a dollar or less per issue, at which price I was able to obtain all four, and Details even threw in a black gym bag. True, I have no use for a gym bag, but,…
I HAVEN'T HAD a shoeshine, a professional shine, in more than a decade, maybe two. I shine my own shoes, usually once a week. Shoeshine parlors were common when I was a boy, and even a young man, in Chicago; most barbershops also had a shoeshine man. Not always but often he was black. I stopped…
THE $19 HOT DOG has arrived. I came into this valuable news through the Wall Street Journal, which reports that they are gussying up hot dogs in New York and Los Angeles. The $19 dog is available at a joint called the Old Homestead. A Kobe beef frankfurter, it is "parboiled and served with Kobe…
Seriously Funny
DURING a question-and-answer period following one of his lectures, the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was asked what he thought about England's place in the European Union. "I don't," Oakeshott replied, "see that I am required to have an opinion on that." I found that response very…
I DON'T KNOW how seriously to take the alarming talk about the spread of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. For now I prefer to think of it as SAMS, or Severe Acute Media Syndrome, as David Baltimore, the president of Caltech, recently called it, suggesting that its danger has been greatly…
Selected Poems
An Improbable Life Memoirs by Robert Craft Vanderbilt University Press, 560 pp., $39.95 Memories and Commentaries by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft Faber and Faber, 336 pp., $35 WHEN IGOR STRAVINSKY died on April 6, 1971, the composer George Perle remarked that "this is the first time in six…
WFMT is the name of a religious cult in Chicago that disguises itself as a radio station. The religion is that of musical culture, classical music and opera chiefly. I happen to belong to this cult. Its announcers are careful never to mispronounce foreign names or words; the station eschews all…
"THEY ORDER, said I, this matter better in France," began Laurence Sterne in his eighteenth-century travel book, "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy." Although the matter was rather a different one, my shoes in hand, I thought, they don't do at all badly in Germany, either. I had just…
MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a sub-editor at the New Leader magazine, I tried to get the literary journalist Dwight Macdonald, whom at the time I much admired, to write something for the magazine. I don't remember what it was I wanted him to write--a book review, I think--but I do recall his writing…
Max Beerbohm A kind of a life by N. John Hall Yale University Press, 284 pp., $24.95 LOVERS--no lesser word will do--of the prose, caricatures, and mind of Max Beerbohm constitute a cult. Membership in the cult requires a strong penchant for irony, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sharp taste for…
A FEW WEEKS AGO a nice woman who lives in my building asked if I would be interested in teaching two morning sessions devoted to Montaigne to her book group. They would be meeting in Starved Rock, Illinois. My and my wife's expenses would be paid, and I would be given a $600 fee. The setting was…
A WARM MONDAY NIGHT in Chicago, and I'm feeling flush and contented, departing a parking lot with my wife, beginning our walk to the Emperor's Choice, our favorite Chinese restaurant on Wentworth Avenue. A guy in his early thirties, in jeans, a well-worn cambray work shirt, and a white hard hat,…
KHAKIS, you may not have noticed, are in crisis. Sales of casual pants for men, among which khakis predominate, have fallen off. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reports that they are down 11.5 percent, grossing $3.86 billion last year, while jeans have held steady, with sales of $4.94…
MY EFFICIENT EDITOR at Houghton Mifflin has just sent me an e-mail informing me that finished copies of a new book I have written will come off the press on May 31, with books to be shipped to bookstores on June 6, after which I shall receive my author's shipment of--if I remember correctly--twenty…
STRUGGLING TO TELL his mistress Louise Colet how deeply he felt about her, Flaubert exclaimed, "The language is inept." I suspect the old boy meant "insufficient," which, unfortunately, it often is. There ought, for example, to be a word that falls between "talent" and "genius"; and a word between…
ALOFT, on a plane headed for San Francisco, reading the early pages of the excellent biography of the Sanskrit scholar Max Muller by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, I came across the following item about life in the ducal city of Dessau in Germany, where Muller was born in 1823: "One thing which helped the…
THIS MORNING, out for a walk in wintry weather, I discovered a young student from the Northwestern School of Music struggling on the icy sidewalk while carrying a double bass. "Excuse me," said I, as our paths crossed, "but have you ever considered taking up the harmonica?" He took it, as the…
I READ John Podhoretz's "Multiplex Blues," his amusing account of the difference between the broken-down theaters of his early moviegoing days in the 1970s and the plush multiplexes and cineplexes in which the inferior flicks of today are shown, with the smug smile of the man with history on his…
AN ARTICLE in a recent issue of the Women's Quarterly bemoans the absence of the teaching of handwriting in schools, pointing out that this is especially a hardship on young boys. Handwriting apparently comes less easily for boys than it does for girls. "Boys are graphologically challenged," the…
IN 1951, the literary critic Alfred Kazin published a schmaltzily sentimental memoir called "Walker in the City" in which he was able to demonstrate his sensitivity and superiority to his family, his friends, and his contemporaries. I have myself become a walker outside the city, with none of the…
YOUR BASIC LANGUAGE SNOB—that, friend, would be me—is never out of work. Just as he gets his wind back after railing about one or another overworked or idiotically used word, fresh misusages appear to cause him to get his knickers in a fine new twist. Everyday evidence of the inefficacy of my…
ON JUNE 28, MORTIMER J. ADLER, propagandist for the reading of great books, indexer extraordinaire, and the world’s highest-salaried philosopher, died at the age of ninety-eight. I worked for Mortimer, as we all called him, in the late 1960s. After a year-long stint as the director of an…
IT IS 7 A.M. AND I HAVE JUST ARISEN, two hours later than usual. My wife and eleven-year-old granddaughter are still asleep in the second of this two-bedroom condominium we have rented on Sanibel Island, Florida, which also contains two bathrooms and three television sets, all with VCRs. I open a…
I WENT TO A HIGH SCHOOL with perhaps fifty different extracurricular clubs that, whatever their other shortcomings, at least let one know one's exact social standing. Status under this arrangement was as finely calibrated as any I have since encountered. Athletes, good guys, ladies' men, genial…
I have a small, slowly growing list of people who mustn't expect an invitation to lunch from me. Roger Clemens is on it; so, among others, are Donald Trump, Jack Valenti, Shirley MacLaine, Howell Raines, Jack Quinn, Barbara Walters, and Alan Dershowitz. Loaded with odious and silly opinions, their…
I have a small, slowly growing list of people who mustn't expect an invitation to lunch from me. Roger Clemens is on it; so, among others, are Donald Trump, Jack Valenti, Shirley MacLaine, Howell Raines, Jack Quinn, Barbara Walters, and Alan Dershowitz. Loaded with odious and silly opinions, their…
Everyone knows about the Seven Deadly Sins -- Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Covetousness, Sloth -- but I wonder if alongside them we ought to find a place for what I think of as Enlivening Sins. These are sins, too, but quite minor, rather sweet ones, and instead of knocking a person out of…
My idol in matters sartorial is that great villain of American literature Gilbert Osmond, of Henry James's Portrait of A Lady, who, James tells us, "was dressed as a man dresses who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar things." Searching my own wardrobe for vulgar things, I…
My idol in matters sartorial is that great villain of American literature Gilbert Osmond, of Henry James's Portrait of A Lady, who, James tells us, "was dressed as a man dresses who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar things." Searching my own wardrobe for vulgar things, I…
I have a friend who scored heavily early in life and became a venture capitalist. Over lunch one day he entertained me by recounting the nutty projects that people brought to him for financing: a geriatric dog food, an electric fountain pen, cell-phone implants. I wish he were still capital…
After more than a decade, our apartment is being repainted. Rugs have gone off for cleaning. Furniture that we have had for more than twenty years is being replaced. The sense of a new leaf is upon me, which has brought on the urge to live, somehow, differently than I have until now. No way could…
The word downsizing, both an excuse and not a very happy euphemism for firing people, needs, I have decided, a mate: upsizing. The country seems to be in a serious upsizing phase. When and where and how it began, I don't pretend to know, but I have a lurking -- as opposed to a somersaulting --…
While motoring along nicely in Roger Shattuck's Proust's Way, I was stopped when I read, on page 186, apropos of C. K. Scott Montcrieff's translation of Remembrance of Things Past, that "many critics, myself included, pointed out annoying bloomers and occasional excesses of style." Looking up from…
I fancy myself a connoisseur of the naming of Americans, and as such have discovered that we gringos do a few things in this line that no one else does. George W. Bush -- whose middle initial has all but become his last name -- may be mildly amused to learn that only Americans go in for middle…
I don't believe I have attitude, but I do own at least one bow tie that does. Some readers will wonder if that sentence isn't missing an indefinite article. Shouldn't it be "an attitude"? For anyone who feels the want of that indefinite article, I can only say, in the mortal words of Mr. T., from…
Haute Cuisine
Politicians are not my dish of tea. I do not long for their company. Of the few I've met, I have admired the salesmanly quality of some among them. I directed the anti-poverty program in Little Rock in the middle 1960s, and after spending fifteen minutes with Wilbur Mills, then chairman of the…
I could be wrong about this, but I'm guessing that not many readers of this magazine know who Chad Muska is. Let me quickly break the tension by reporting that Chad Muska is a big name in skate boarding -- a kid of 22, long turned professional -- and, yo, I'm wearing the dude's shoes. Not his…
Aristotle, in The Rhetoric, describes the metaphor as the joining of dissimilars to show their similarity. He offers a number of examples from Homer, the franchise player of Greek literature, at one point noting his choice of the dawn as "rosy-fingered" as so much better than "crimson-fingered" or,…
Fasten your seatbelt, kiddo, we're going over a bumpy bit of language, another little pot-hole on the rocky road of thought, this puppy yclept -- no hyphen, please -- "multitasker." The word is popping up of late with a fair regularity in that thesaurus of faux pas, that ample warehouse of wretched…
I went to the University of Chicago, which is considered, as the world reckons these things, a fairly serious place. Heavy, grey, false yet nevertheless massively impressive Gothic architecture. First atom split in a handball court by Enrico Fermi & Co. Enough Nobel prize winners to field a weak…
A. J. Ayer, A Life, by Ben Rogers, Chatto & Windus, 402 pp., £20
I OPENED THE New York Times the other day to discover that Jervis Anderson, "New Yorker Writer and Biographer of [Bayard] Rustin, is Dead at 67." I realized, with a stab of hopeless sadness, that we hadn't spoken for nearly three years -- a long time for someone I liked as much as I liked Jervis.…
Each morning, when the New York Times arrives, after checking the obituaries, I go right for the letters to the editor. What I am looking for is a man or woman after my own heart: someone publicly announcing a heterodox opinion that is courageously, elegantly congruent with one of mine. I am…
Yesterday's mail brought a book from a friend -- not a close friend, but someone I like a lot -- and I was pleased to see that my name wasn't mentioned in his acknowledgments. Instead the book bears an inscription that states "Thanks very much for your help and good advice during the past couple of…
I hope it isn't too early to begin predictions for the new millennium, because I have a small, modest, even parochial one to make, and here it is: Before the first decade of our third millennium, a Jewish high holiday service will be led by a rabbi -- I do not say an Orthodox rabbi -- wearing a…
Every Saturday morning, from early June until late October, I go to the farmer's market in our town and feel as if I have stepped into a Koren cartoon. People look a bit shaggy, strange, rather as if they were themselves animated fruits and vegetables. While there, I myself sometimes feel a bit…
Melancholy has its Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy), Snobbery has its Thackeray (author of The Book of Snobs), but Boredom, a much more capacious field than either, has no one similar. Boredom needs help. It awaits its Linnaeus, the great taxonomist, someone to classify the bores…
George Eliot -- of all people! -- once called correct English "the slang of the prigs." I happen to be one of those prigs, who not merely slings that slang on every possible occasion but takes a certain quiet but smug pride in using such words as "decimate" and "transpire" with sweet precision. I…
I don't expect ever to write anything that will gain me less sympathy than this, so I might as well get right to it: I bought a new car this week, rather a grand car, I'm afraid. It's a Jaguar, something called the S-Type sedan, with the smaller of the two engines offered, and I would like everyone…
I own a Rolodex that I inherited -- took, really -- from someone dear to me after his death, nearly a decade ago. It is black, plastic, hump-backed like a 1942 Plymouth coupe, and made by a firm called Zephyr American Corp. I don't know how long ago it was manufactured, but it already has that…
I am a bit surprised that Miles isn't showing up more nowadays as a name for boys. Not that it has ever been a wildly popular name. The only boy I knew named Miles was Miles Uritz, with whom I went to grammar school and whose father was a bookie working out of a cigar stand in a building on Lake…
Owing to the fact that my normal five o'clock shadow had of late begun to appear around noon, three weeks ago I bought a new safety razor, a Schick, with a red handle, called, in good pseudo-macho manner, the Protector. This may not at first seem significant, but my buying a Schick razor marks a…
My pity goes out to the monolingual, those poor devils trapped in the prison of a single language, their linguistic horizons occluded by knowing only the language of their own country. My pity, I had better quickly insert, is self-pity, for I am such a prisoner -- a lifer, it is beginning to become…
The Cultural Literacy Monster first raised its ignorant head for me some fifteen or so years ago, when I gave a lecture to several hundred freshmen at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. It was a lecture no doubt too heavily peppered with proper names, and even as I gassed away, I saw that what…
Isaiah Berlin -- with two long i's in the first name for the proper pronunciation, please -- was a name that rang the gong in the best academic and intellectual circles for nearly half a century. "Isaiah" -- I have heard that name roll off anglophiliac lips with no less pleasure than a wine…
Reading along in My Name Escapes Me, the diary of Alec Guinness, that most subtle and modest of modern actors, I came across Sir Alec's avowal of his shame at being a slow reader. In his mid eighties, he notes: "I think it stems (apart from slowness of the brain) from the fact that when I come…
I like to have a few handsomely misused words going at all times that drive me a little nutty. It's good, I believe, for my blood pressure, which is normally low, but which the American language and people, in their combined genius, often help to raise. For a while, what I thought of as "the flying…
On April 11, 1819, John Keats, on his way to meet his publisher, ran into one of his former medical-school teachers, Joseph Green, who introduced him to his companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the famous talkers of his day. Sad to report, one of the means to becoming a famous talker is being…
Some years ago, in a Poloniuslike mood, I offered my son a bit of advice. I told him that I hoped he would go to a university of which the world has a high opinion. He would find the world wrong, of course, for the school, whichever one it happened to be, wouldn't be all that good. With perhaps a…
A tippler I take to be someone who boozes in small quantities but regularly, stopping just short of actual drunkenness. Your tippler tends to operate on the sly, if not the sneak. He ducks into a bar for a quick one. He keeps a bottle in the office, maybe a flask in the car. The thought of being…
Wherein lies the pleasure of catching someone out in an error? It gives one, no doubt, that little touch of self-congratulatory superiority that helps one get through another day. It's finest when one catches an enemy or adversary in an error, but catching a person one is quite neutral about will…
Wherein lies the pleasure of catching someone out in an error? It gives one, no doubt, that little touch of self-congratulatory superiority that helps one get through another day. It's finest when one catches an enemy or adversary in an error, but catching a person one is quite neutral about will…
Has anyone the area code for Stockholm? I need to call the Nobel Prize Committee, fast. I've got an idea. It's time they added a new prize -- one that, in my view, ought to have been instituted from the beginning of the Nobel Prizes in 1901.
One among my several immodest ambitions is to leave behind a word or two of my own invention before departing the planet. I want to leave a precise word, a useful word, a good word, a word that absorbs a sweet bit of truth. Neologism, not socialism, is the name of my desire.
I recently picked up a collection of poems by a writer named Ann Carson and was happily struck by the simplicity of the biographical note -- or bio, as it's called in the trade -- written about the author. In its fine stark entirety, it reads: "Ann Carson lives in Canada." Not even the province in…
It's almost always a mistake not to speak of the dead, especially when one has good things to say. I passed up a chance to do so a while back, and I continue to regret it. An acquaintance -- one on the cusp of becoming a friend -- died in his middle sixties. He was a widower and a painter, an…
I have long considered myself a minor connoisseur of the titles of books. Some titles seem so perfectly right, others so wrong as to kill the books before they leave the print shop. What if Flaubert, for example, had given his novel Madame Bovary the title Emma, and Jane Austen had decided to give…
It's happened again, I won't say against my best efforts, but there it is, or rather there they are, books all over the joint with my bookmarks in them. Do I have more than 20 books going at once? I am a bit nervous about counting them, for they are all-too-vivid a sign of the lack of organization,…
There is a time in life when civilized tact checks out and dangerous candor checks in. Usually the time is late in one's seventies or in one's eighties. The condition seems to afflict men more than women. The grave yawns, further suppression of long repressed views no longer seems to have much…
I have become a more attentive driver than heretofore. I used to be dreamy, listening to classical music, hoping that some phrase or formulation pertinent to whatever it was I was writing at the moment would pop into my mind. Over the past decade, I have been driving BMWs, and they give a nice…
"The little grey cells," says Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's great Belgian detective, touching an index finger to his forehead, "ah, Hastings, they are what matter." Those little cells representing our brain power -- who today does not worry about losing them at too rapid a clip? As early as…
I have a taste, a craving, a positive jones for generalization. Through words, generalizations give patterns to experience. Such patterns are not only necessary if you want to make any sense out of the world at all; they are inherently pleasing things, or at least to me they are. Making…
If writers can be said to have a leading hobby, that hobby is the collecting of grievances. How nicely they pile up, like a child's collection of Beanie Babies, one atop the other, a writer's grievances against his publisher(s), his editors, his agent, of course his reviewers and critics, his…
"Christ," thinks the wife of Harry Morgan, the hero of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, "I could do that all night if a man was built that way." But, of course, a man isn't. Men aren't built other ways as well. "Men don't like complicated food," says one spinsterish character to another in a…
This is going to be Super Bowl XXXI, and it is with no pride whatsoever that I have to report having watched the preceding XXX. Only two have left memories in my mind. The first, when Joe Namath and the Jets shocked the greatly favored Baltimore Colts. The second, when my own team, the Chicago…
From the living-room window of my sixth-floor apartment, I can see, less than half a block away, the headquarters of the world's greatest lost cause: the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I look upon it fondly, not because I am for bringing back Prohibition, but because I long ago enrolled in the…
I have a new grandson with the admirable name of Nicholas Charles Epstein. Nick Charles, moviegoers will happily recall, is the name of the suave detective played by William Powell in the Thin Man movies. A friend, when told of my new grandson's name, said she hopes it won't be long before he's…
Roughly four-fifths through Patrimony, a memoir of his father and one of his best books, Philip Roth recounts his aged father, then in the grip of a tumor pressing against his brain and the victim of several small strokes, having, in his own word, "beshat" himself at Roth's country house in…
Two years ago I had a call from Gene Siskel, who lives in Chicago, as I do. Siskel is a man others envy, possibly hate, for having what looks like one of the world's best and easiest jobs: sitting before a television camera, chatting about movies, for maybe -- who knows? -- a couple million a year.…
The past few years have seen the deaths of Ralph Ellison and Joseph Mitchell, two of America's most remarkable writers. The one a novelist, the other a journalist, each was thought by many people the best at his respective trade.
Andrew Ferguson's recent evisceration of focus groups, another of the fine frauds of our day, is but the opening shot in a war I believe we must wage to the bitter end -- a war on the word "focus" itself.
An entry in my journal of roughly five years ago reads: "I learned that my cholesterol count is a very fine 185. Must carefully cross all streets. It would be a shame to die with so splendid a cholesterol count." On the other hand, it might give my son a talking point at my memorial service. "My…
For roughly twenty years, between the 1950s and the 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge was perhaps the most amusing writer in the English-speaking world. I do not say the wittiest, or the most humorous, but the most amusing. More efficiently than anyone else, he could set one to musing, chiefly about how…
For roughly twenty years, between the 1950s and the 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge was perhaps the most amusing writer in the English-speaking world. I do not say the wittiest, or the most humorous, but the most amusing. More efficiently than anyone else, he could set one to musing, chiefly about how…
Do the arts, with all their oddity and intricacy, have a peculiar resistance to being discussed in the frame of reference known as policy? Consider a September afternoon in 1939 on which was hatched what the Times Literary Supplement of January 2, 1987, dubbed "The Plot to Save the Artists."
Do the arts, with all their oddity and intricacy, have a peculiar resistance to being discussed in the frame of reference known as policy? Consider a September afternoon in 1939 on which was hatched what the Times Literary Supplement of January 2, 1987, dubbed "The Plot to Save the Artists."
Ah, the past, that warm and cordial land, where one Was so contented, so snug, and limitlessly happy, though one cannot remember just why. The past is the best of all places, no doubt about it, much superior to the present and, in the view of most people nowadays, certainly much to "be preferred to…