Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell sneaks into a movie.

The borders around the 140-square-mile Gaza strip are guarded heavily by both its neighbors, Israel and Egypt, and the sea lanes are blockaded. Israel has lately managed to stop the rockets that the Palestinian radical group Hamas, which runs Gaza, has been firing into its southern cities. Israel…

Maybe not since the proto-Protestant radical Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and set on fire with two of his clerical accomplices in 1498 has Florence seen a weekend so filled with terrifying surprises and reversals of fortune. On Sunday morning, March 4, the city awoke to discover that Davide…

Tomorrow some people from Catholic Charities are coming to tow away the beautiful BMW 740iL that my father bought in Germany at the turn of the century. Like the vast majority of American males he was until then a car enthusiast who had never owned a nice car. He didn’t suffer from that​—​fancy…

Since January, the most important person in the campaign for the Italian elections coming on March 4 has been a missing person. Sad selfies of Pamela Mastropietro, a troubled 18-year-old from Rome, have appeared on the front pages of Italy’s newspapers since her body was found, chopped up, rinsed…

An ex-convict named Abraham Shakespeare thought he had hit the big time in 2006. He won $30 million in the Quick-Pick, one of Florida’s state lottery games. Women flocked to him, including one named Dee Dee Moore, who had a genius for embezzlement. By 2008, Shakespeare was a missing person. Police…

In nine days in early December, eight young people died of overdoses in Fairfax County, Va., the second-richest of the 3,007 counties in the United States. Mass events like these happen frequently and in all sorts of places. A half-dozen people died in the small Rhode Island town of Burrillville in…

When the nationalistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept into the national legislature with 13 percent of the vote in the fall, the American op-ed industry boomed but Germans mostly took it in stride. The country has had populist parties since World War II, even extremist ones. They have…

A notice came last week from a newspaper I subscribe to. Since “offering check payments is becoming increasingly difficult to support,” the paper is “looking to move all our readers to digital payment methods.” The letter was bossy and presumptuous but the upshot was clear. There’s no longer anyone…

The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…

The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…

The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…

The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…

Berlin

Berlin

Eccentric Culture

 I spent a dreary half-week in Helsinki a few years ago. It was mid-March. Short days, empty streets, damp snow blowing off the harbor. The Finns I met said: “Come back in July. There’s nothing like a Scandinavian summer.”

This past week, at least a dozen French people, most of them journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were gunned down during an editorial meeting by the brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi, two French Muslims who may have returned recently from waging jihad in Syria. French citizens…

British voters have just shocked Europe—and perhaps themselves—by repudiating their conservative prime minister Theresa May. May called a snap election because it seemed an easy way to bolster her slender parliamentary majority as she began negotiating Britain's exit from the European Union. That…

Not since 2011, when Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi was captured on a wiretap disparaging the size of her backside, has Angela Merkel suffered so grievously from the boorishness of allies. Donald Trump, on his first diplomatic visit to Europe, strong-armed the prime minister of Montenegro. He…

Tokyo

The 19th-century Irish-American vagabond and travel writer Lafcadio Hearn opened the first of his many books on Japan by quoting an English professor whom he met in his first days there. "Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible," the old scholar said. "They are…

The 19th-century Irish-American vagabond and travel writer Lafcadio Hearn opened the first of his many books on Japan by quoting an English professor whom he met in his first days there. "Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible," the old scholar said. "They are…

"Everyone said it would be impossible to do what we did," France's new president, 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, told a crowd of politely applauding supporters in the courtyard of the Louvre shortly after the polls had closed on May 7. "But they didn't know France!"

You could tell the European political establishment had taken a shine to 39-year-old French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron by the number of articles in which he was referred to as both a "centrist" and an "outsider." Angelique Chrisafis, of Britain's Guardian, even called him a "maverick…

If Britain winds up leaving the European Union, it will be the doing of a woman who was not even publicly identified with the cause when voters approved the referendum for “Brexit" 10 months ago. This week Conservative prime minister Theresa May called a general election for June 8. It will…

The pronouncement that “democracies don't go to war with one another" has been a standby of chipper talk-show personalities for most of this century. We might want to reconsider it in light of the way Dutch and Turkish authorities were brought to the brink of an armed confrontation by little more…

A machete, a chainsaw, a potter's wheel, jumper cables, and an actual stack of Bibles: Anyone who saw what was sitting on my writer's desk right now would either diagnose paranoia or predict my imminent flight "off the grid." But the avocado-green Dutch oven, the cobalt-blue stemmed-glass dessert…

No journalist really understood the forces that over the past year made Donald Trump president, with the possible exception of the former newspaper publisher Conrad Black. In early 2016, with the primary season barely underway, Black wrote a column in Canada’s National Post entitled "Don't…

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick was not going out of his mind when he told his team after its first playoff victory this year: “A big day for Rutgers!" Three of the Patriots' players—Devin McCourty, Logan Ryan, and Duron Harmon—had gone to college there, and all three had intercepted…

Years ago, when I was writing about a wave of immigrant violence in France, a higher-up in the housing authority of a provincial city took me on a tour of some slum projects. Alphonse was his name. He was the directeur de régie de gestion, which, as best I could translate, meant "director of the…

They are keening in the Bay Area. "Oh, America, what have we done?" wrote a San Bruno reader to the San Francisco Chronicle the week after November's election. "Many of us feel for President Obama, especially as we watch him gracefully support Donald Trump's transition, knowing Trump's priorities…

They are keening in the Bay Area. “Oh, America, what have we done?" wrote a San Bruno reader to the San Francisco Chronicle the week after November's election. "Many of us feel for President Obama, especially as we watch him gracefully support Donald Trump's transition, knowing Trump's priorities…

The alt-right movement, relatively minuscule but outsized in the media coverage it has received before and since Donald Trump's election, is the latest iteration of America's dalliance with identity politics. So writes WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times. Here's…

How could they? It's the question being asked by all the world's press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump's private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the…

How could they? It’s the question being asked by all the world's press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump's private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the…

Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they're going to "move to Paris."

Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they’re going to "move to Paris."

French authorities spent this week razing the notorious Jungle migrant camp, which THE WEEKLY STANDARD visited last winter. The Jungle was a shocking place. What made it unusual in the recent history of European migration is that it resulted from an actual obstacle being placed in migrants' way.…

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he's being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he’s being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is not only merited. It is inspiring, thrilling, reassuring. It restores a bit of faith in the prize itself. In recent decades the Nobel committee had taken to honoring fashionable charlatans or, at best, writers of limited scope and only…

"Excessive" is the word that Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch president of the Eurozone countries, used for the Obama Justice Department's decision in mid-September to seek mammoth fines from Deutsche Bank. The German bank's various mortgage-underwriting violations were committed in the days before…

A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting…

A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting…

There were seventy reporters credentialed to the New York Mets instructional league in Port St Lucie, Florida, this week. The 29-year-old college-football broadcaster, Christian evangelist and former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow was taking his first swings and shagging his first flies as a…

Germany is blowing up again over migration. The Saxon town of Bautzen has, like dozens of similar places across Germany, a barracks for some of the million or two Middle Eastern migrants who have been streaming across the Mediterranean for the past year-and-a-half. People in Bautzen aren't used to…

Modern societies have problems with social cohesion. Austria's problem is with adhesion. The envelopes for the postal ballots in the presidential revote scheduled for October don't stick, the interior ministry announced this week. He hinted that he might have to postpone the election. Some allege…

A surprising German poll showed Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) tied for second place with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) just before this weekend's regional elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The incumbent Social Democrats are at 28 percent, the CDU and the…

Phew! "Turkey sends tanks into Syria ...," CNN headlined on Thursday. "The goal is to crush ISIS." It's about time Turkey joined the war against Islamist terror. Some had suspected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having a soft spot for ISIS, even of letting his country be used as a supply…

How on earth does Angela Merkel think she is going to get re-elected?

Seventeen-year-old ISIS volunteer Kadiza Sultana was killed by a Russian bombing strike in Syria, according to the BBC. One extraordinary thing about her is that she was already, at her age, a widow: The ISIS fighter she had married (or been married off to) had lately been killed in action. What…

In the last days of July, German chancellor Angela Merkel rushed back to Berlin from her summer vacation to tell her countrymen how strong they were. She had done the same thing a year earlier, when Europe faced a wave of refugees from the war in Syria, joined by migrants from Iraq, Iran, and…

For a minute or two last week, over coffee in a working-class bakery in Massachusetts, I recovered my optimism about the human race. To say working-class might be a stretch. It was in a gentrifying neighborhood once inhabited by factory workers. It had an Italian name. Everyone was welcoming,…

London

Last month, I had to stay a night in Oxford. Having not set foot there since my 20s, I was looking forward to it. If memory served, there were good B&Bs near the Thames and the Cherwell. There were rooms at the colleges where one could stay for cheap. Any place would serve, as long as it was close…

London

Early in the Internet’s life, and relatively late in his own, the great journalist Christopher Hitchens embarrassed me away from the Web. This embarrassment, luckily, did not involve his writing anything. He had invited me to work on a project and deadlines were approaching. I emailed him without…

Her politics are leftish, and her hottest tirades are reserved for Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and both George Bushes. But the novelist Joan Didion voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964—"ardently," by her own account—and swears that "had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would…

Not many people had heard of Frauke Petry, a pretty and very sassy 40-year-old chemist, until she started talking about how a country without borders is not a country at all and railing against the political establishment. It is natural for Americans to think of Petry as a kind of German version of…

Calais

"Suddenly there was a hand on my bottom .  .  ." was the rather atypical headline that ran in Germany's ordinarily conservative daily newspaper Die Welt on January 4. It described a riot-like series of sexual assaults and robberies carried out on New Year's Eve in the center of Cologne on the…

It is sad to walk down a poor street lined with $60,000 houses and to see, as one often does, a $45,000 car in one of the driveways. It is often some kind of macho Mustang, freshly washed, gaudy of hue, souped up, and glittery with detailing. What are these people thinking? Why not get a perfectly…

The other day, sitting around naked in a Bavarian hotel with a woman I'd just met, I thought of the best-mannered person I ever knew. Andrzej came from an elegant Warsaw family. I met him at the very end of his long and difficult life, when he was singing "Sto Lat" at his American grandsons'…

If Europe doesn’t get serious about protecting its borders, it’s going to head back to the days of barbed wire and concrete walls. That’s what President François Hollande warned when he went before a rare joint sitting of France’s National Assembly and Senate to argue for an extended three-month…

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me.

Vienna

Until mid-September, the half-million migrants who had been marching northwards into central Europe seemed like the Old World equivalent of Hurricane Sandy survivors. Families uprooted by the war in Syria were seeking safety, according to this view of things. It was sad to see little girls sleeping…

You could tell that the plan European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced on September 9 for distributing 160,000 refugees around the European Union was slapdash. You could tell by the number of times Juncker felt he had to browbeat his listeners about their Nazi past. “We Europeans…

In the early 1990s, amid public outrage over Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit photographs, including several of private parts, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) would settle arguments on the matter by pulling out his own. That the most avowedly conservative politician in America felt the need to…

Maybe “Culture Belongs to Everyone,” as they say at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park shows, but the works of Atlantic essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates appear to exist in another realm altogether. In the weeks since the publication of Between the World and Me, Coates’s letter to his…

Lately my home life has felt like a camping trip. I have been waking at 3 a.m. or so and staring. Stirring at night is one thing—rolling over, drifting into semi-consciousness, having a stray thought or two either to be remembered or not remembered in the morning—but staring is quite another. In…

A mass outbreak of syphilis, the radical economist and member of parliament Costas Lapavitsas told an interviewer, is about the only thing the European political establishment did not threaten Greece’s voters with before the country’s early-July referendum. 

I had coffee at Peet’s with a childhood friend who is plotting a major change in his life. Victor will pull it off. He has done it before. He does not subscribe to the lazy American view that there is something special about having big “dreams.” Every loser has them. But Victor works. In him,…

David Catanese has a long profile of Jeb Bush in U.S. News & World Report. It’s well worth reading. But this line really stuck out:

On a bright, zero-degree morning last month, as I was happily making my bed in the attic of friends in Brooklyn, I thought with a shudder of Ignác Hrubý. Being a houseguest is one of my joys. It combines security and adventure, familiarity and independence. Having houseguests used to be a joy, too.…

In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters’ retreat of Woodstock. He was a “protest singer,” to use a term that was then new. His lyrics—profound, tender,…

In Athens in mid-January, two weeks before the election that would make 40-year-old engineer Alexis Tsipras Greece’s new prime minister, a bunch of cleaning ladies explained to me why they planned to vote for his party, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza, for its Greek acronym). We met where…

Towards midnight one night last week I walked miles down the pitch-black European shore of the Bosphorus, the 15-mile channel that splits Istanbul and Turkey in half. To any watcher of TV news, that will sound nuts. Fifteen million people have converged on Istanbul in recent decades, cramming into…

French readers follow the herd. They believe in prizes. When a French author wins the Goncourt or the Nobel, people rush to bookstores and send his books rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists. But today the French have other things on their minds. President François Hollande is France’s…

A lot of people worry about Ebola these days. Not me. I’m calm, relatively speaking. That is, I’m calm, relative to the shuddering, sobbing basket case that the mere thought of infectious disease once reduced me to.

Boston

Ferguson, Mo.

A few weeks ago the Times Literary Supplement ran a photograph of the grisliest act of violence in Italy since World War II—Italy’s equivalent of our own September 11 attacks. In 1980 a shadowy group of homegrown terrorists planted a time bomb in the waiting room of the Bologna Central station.…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Christopher Caldwell reading his essay "Stranger on a Train."

Kiev

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty’s new book on inequality and wealth, “will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.” Clive Crook describes the raptures with which intellectuals have greeted…

Amsterdam 

Paris

Back in the 1980s I spent one afternoon working for Ralph Nader and wound up with bite marks all over my bum. The memory returned a couple nights ago when a college kid came to the door, shaking the cup for some charity. He’d memorized a spiel about dioxins and microfluids and picoliters. He must…

Late last August, along the coast of New Hampshire, Kevin Walsh, police chief in the town of Rye, got a lecture on law enforcement from a bunch of grown-up bicyclists. Local law requires bikers to ride single-file when there is traffic. But this day, a pack of a dozen or so bikers were racing down…

Berlin

There is something futile about breakfast meetings. Breakfast ought to be where you dissipate the irrationality of dream-life and find your way back to a clear view of the things you care about in the waking world. Alcoholic memoirs are full of where-the-hell-am-I stories, some funny (“I seem to…

Just out of college I ran into my acquaintance Mona at a party in Boston. She was leaving the next day for the house on Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where she had spent her summers growing up. Mahone Bay was remote and beautiful, she explained, and no one had ever heard of it. I told her I had heard of…

On Sunday, Nevada’s Democratic senator Harry Reid said that taking away the Senate minority’s right to filibuster would be outrageous, and even criminal. “That contempt for the rule of law and the law of rules,” Reid said, “will set a new precedent—an illegal precedent—that will always remain on…

An older Ukrainian guy walks his dogs in the woods near my house. We talk a lot. The other day I was complaining about tendonitis in my ankle, which was causing me pain. 

Rome

If it is true that people’s political assumptions reflect the battles that were being waged when they were 18, then my assumptions are probably unreasonable. The first political leader to whom I paid serious attention wound up the most successful Western leader since the Second World War. I spent…

Dublin

In the 1930s, a group of psychologists and physical anthropologists at Harvard chose 268 students whose medical, amatory, and career experiences they wished to document over the remaining decades of their lives. Department-store mogul W. T. Grant, who bankrolled the study, was curious about what…

Had this presidential campaign been a chess match, one move would have merited a row of exclamation points. A chess master will violate the rules of strategy as neophytes understand them (“You’re gonna lose your Queen!”) but only because he sees possibilities on the board that are invisible to…

Tbilisi

The Sunday before last, my plane was half an hour away from Budapest and a stewardess was bustling clumsily down the aisle. I was reading John Lukacs’s Budapest 1900. Something in his description of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led me to be glad I was wearing a neat shirt and blazer. In some…

It would be a good parlor game to draw up a list illustrating the variety of great men New England has produced—starting with the archetypal New England poet Robert Frost, continuing through, say, Benjamin Franklin, the gunsmith Samuel Colt, the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, the Watergate…

In a beautiful poem called “The Capital,” W. H. Auden talks about rich people “waiting expensively for miracles to happen.” That is what is happening in all the capitals of Europe now, nowhere more so than in Madrid. Spain’s economy carries two impossible burdens. It has the most overregulated…

The French prefer “tenacity” to “cooperation” by a measure of 51-44 percent, according to a poll about political attitudes published this election season. By 57-41 percent they like “hard work and courage” better than “social justice and solidarity.” Such attitudes have not been widespread in…

Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner cannot claim to be the only world leader to lash out against oil speculators this week. Last Tuesday President Obama used an appearance in the White House Rose Garden to do the same. But Kirchner put her money where her mouth is. She announced she…

A

If you understood how French president Nicolas Sarkozy found himself holed up in a barroom in Bayonne last Thursday afternoon, it would take you a long way towards figuring out what is going to happen in France’s two-round presidential election, coming up in April and May. Sarkozy, who heads…

Last week Germany reclaimed its status as the leading power in Europe. In the two years since it became apparent that Greece was, essentially, bankrupt, there have been dozens of emergency meetings of the countries that use the common European currency, the euro. Most of the euro-using states…

I

A friend told me at dinner over New Year’s break that people had started walking at night in New York’s Central Park again. In the year just ended, the New York Times reports, there was about one robbery in the park every three weeks. Back in the 1980s, when I started visiting, there were two a…

Was it Western strength that triumphed over communism or Western freedom? It was both, of course, but Václav Havel, who died last week at the age of 75 in the Czech Republic, has always had a special place in the hearts of those who stress the latter. Lech Walesa, with his shipyard electrician’s…

A lot of intelligent money people think this is make-or-break week for the euro. They say that by Friday, December 9, either there will be a path toward resolution of Europe’s debt crisis, or events will accelerate toward a breakup of the single currency. One such is Morgan Stanley analyst Arnaud…

Just as incoming American presidents are given the atomic “briefcase” by their predecessors, along with the codes for launching a nuclear attack, perhaps Spanish prime ministers will henceforth receive a begging cup and a German phrasebook. It was al Qaeda that made José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of…

Chug-a-lugging malt liquor and smashing things may be the Oakland way of expressing support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. But there are other ways. The movement’s English sympathizers seemed to be asking what Jesus would do. In London last week I decided to visit them. 

London

London

Three or four years ago, during the Neronian decadence that preceded the financial crash of 2008, we got a glossy brochure in the mail from one of our doctors. It announced that for a modest fee—about a hundred dollars per person—our family could enjoy a whole range of special perquisites known as…

Talking Points Memo: Elizabeth Warren will announce her run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts--against Scott Brown--tomorrow.

President Obama’s nomination of former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may finish off the brief political career of the most eccentric and poorly understood figure of the finance crisis. It was Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren who…

To have served as the intellectual architect of the stalest presidential campaign of the modern-media era, to have lost a record number of states, to have gained a reputation for ruthlessness and secrecy in the process—only in Washington is that a recipe for success. Running the 1984 effort of his…

W ith the afternoon off from a conference near Lisbon, I hired a guide to take me to Sintra—stronghold of the Moorish invader 1,200 years ago, center of monastic learning in the Middle Ages, pleasure garden of Portugal’s monarchy in the 19th century, and all of it spread across an upland pine…

There was supposed to be some good news amidst the dismal report card the U.S. real estate market got last week. On average, houses have lost a third of their value since their peak in 2006. Blighted Detroit has seen home prices fall to half their old level, and overbuilt Las Vegas is off by 60…

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was not just rich and powerful. He was also, until last Saturday, the likely next president of France. So commanding was his lead that rumors had been flying since April that Martine Aubry, his chief rival for the…

A mystery lies at the heart of America’s budget politics. In the weeks since debate began on raising the debt limit, President Obama has faulted Republican budget plans as a way of giving favors to “millionaires and billionaires” at the expense of the poor and aged, just as he did during last…

Helsinki If you believe the members of the fastest growing political party in Finland, their country is the sucker, the sap, the patsy among the Nordic nations. Norway never joined the European Union. Sweden and Denmark opted out of using its currency, the euro. Finland, however, is a full member…

The squat old lady standing in the entrance to the café in Saint Petersburg was blowing cigarette smoke out of her nose. She had thick glasses and gave off an air of running the place. In fact, she gave off an air of having run it since the Brezhnev era. I had missed lunch and was starving. I asked…

Paris

In the grand old days before the Irish real estate boom collapsed, the ruling Fianna Fáil party used to campaign the fun way. Infamously, the party held blowout fundraisers every year in a tent at the Galway races. Bankers and property magnates would show up, caked in bling, surrounded by…

There is a sweet spot in France’s cultural life, and maybe in the cultural life of all countries, where a thinker finds himself able to “raise profound questions” in a way that requires neither profundity nor questioning on the part of his readers. Never has a French book hit that sweet spot quite…

Just as he was due to take power over New Year’s weekend, Vincent Gray, the new mayor of Washington, D.C., declared surrender in what voters had anticipated would be a knock-down, drag-out fight. Last November Walmart announced plans to open its first stores in the District. The low-cost retailer…

It has been easy to snicker in recent weeks at the politicians who designed the euro, which appears on the verge of collapse after a decade as the common currency of a dozen countries in the European Union. Last May, the continent’s finance ministers put together a $145-billion package to bail out…

Not knowing how to say “Buzz off” in German, I consented when the taxi driver insisted I put my briefcase in the trunk. I was in a rush—I had a meeting at a government ministry. Almost from the moment the taxi began to move it was clear I had made a mistake. 

"You won’t find a lot of Keynesians here,” explained one German economic policymaker in Berlin in September. That will not be news to anyone who has spoken to his counterparts in Washington. In their view, Germany is a skulker, a rotten citizen of the global economy, the macroeconomic equivalent of…

There are certainly bigots in the world. By no reasonable definition is Juan Williams, whose journalistic career has been capped with several books on civil rights, one of them. But last week, Williams spoke honestly about having had a thought that has occurred to many people. He confessed on…

"Decaying industrial cities" are no longer a blot on the American landscape. What we have now is decayed industrial cities. From a certain vantage point—the consumerist one—the empty shells of these places are more pleasant than the actual, living cities were. Factories, tanneries, and high schools…

In 2005, University of Chicago finance professor Raghuram Rajan published a paper in the proceedings of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City called “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” Rajan, then the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, warned bluntly that…

"You must be busy packing,” an editor once said to me, five days before I flew to Europe to do an article for him. Yeah, I felt like saying, about as busy as you are preparing your retirement party. I pride myself on packing simply and quickly: a few shirts, underclothes, a baggie full of adapters…

I never watch a snowstorm without a feeling of gratitude that I got to live, as a teenager north of Boston, through the Blizzard of 1978. Since Washington is having its snowiest winter in a century, I have been having these feelings a lot. It is not the storm itself that sticks in the memory three…

My wife, back from walking the dog in a rainstorm, was drying her wet sox by the electric space heater in my attic office. I told her to be careful.

Ever since it was carved by treaty out of the Dutch, French, and German borderlands after the Napoleonic wars, Belgium has been an odd kind of country--short on space, sunlight, and national identity. It was a shotgun marriage of two peoples, the Dutch-speaking Flemings in Flanders and the…

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss justice minister, took to the airwaves as soon as her fellow citizens voted by a landslide majority to write a ban on minarets into their constitution. She wanted to make clear to the world that this was "not a vote against Islam." Her government issued a press…

Jytte Klausen's book on the Danish cartoon crisis of 2005-06 opens in an unusual way--with a hand-wringing preemptive apology from Yale University Press for not reprinting (despite its profession to be "an institution deeply committed to free expression") the 12 caricatures of the prophet Muhammad…

When I was around the age of 20, the National Football League started to annoy me, and it hasn't stopped annoying me since. There are few institutions--none outside of academia--that mix pomposity and anti-intellectualism with quite the gusto the NFL does. You have the Roman-numbered Super Bowls…

During the "cartoon crisis" of early 2006--when mobs in Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere attacked embassies, looted buildings, and murdered bystanders to protest the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten--Jytte…

Since late 2007, when Michael Vick, the former star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, was incarcerated for running a dog-fighting club out of his Smithfield, Virginia, home, a lot of things have broken his way. Vick, now 29, was able to spend the last two months of his sentence under house…

Tegucigalpa

During the Kosovo war in 1999, a lot of Americans got a chuckle out of the story--probably apocryphal--about Yugoslav soldiers storming into a Belgrade news agency and demanding that the journalists hand over the Internet. What was funny was the way the soldiers sort of got it. They understood that…

Researching an article on Ireland that ran in the STANDARD last week, I came across a pessimistic series of employment projections by PwC. They sounded important. But I had a problem before I could cite them. Who or what was PwC? Was it the acronym of some trustworthy national statistics office? Of…

More than any other country over the past two decades--more even than China--Ireland has given up its traditional culture for the global economy. In a quarter century, it went from being a little, poverty-stricken, priest-ridden agricultural backwater to a swingin', low-tax, wide-open, unregulated…

For a while, I thought I was on the long slide into sad, sagging middle age, but it turns out I was wrong. My neighbors seemed to be losing interest in me, looking past me, drifting away. You know how it is. One morning you'll bump into a neighbor you've seen taking afternoon walks in the park.…

Britain's politicians care so much about constitutional protections for human rights that they have two sets of them--the centuries-old traditions laid out by parliament and precedent and the newfangled European Convention on Human Rights, written into British law in 1998. Neither of these stopped…

Part of the achievement of John Updike, who died on January 27, was that he became the preeminent all-around man of letters in our cutthroat literary culture without ever losing his reputation as a generous and gentle person. He did so while being derided by half the country as an unadventurous…

Time has killed off a lot of modernist art. College courses that teach Gertrude Stein must be awfully undersubscribed today, assuming they are offered. Modernist sculpture and painting still receive respectful attention, but this is largely because people have so much money invested in them. It…

Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain had much of value to say about the financial crisis as it raged through the headlines this fall. Rather than shred their campaign strategies, they played it safe, as most politicians would have. But in the name of justice we ought to recall that there was one…

Holes are opening in the populated landscape. Outside the attic window where I write this is an abandoned house. A "For Sale" sign, hanging from a yardarm by the front walk, creaks eerily in the wind. It has a permanent look to it, like the soggy "War Is Not the Answer" placards that have lined our…

It must be hard for people under 35 to imagine how large dog mess (as I am constrained to call it) once loomed in the day-to-day life of the nation. Not the metaphorical kind, which retains its privileged position in the fine arts and political oratory, but the actual stuff, as dropped by real…

Paris

Dakar/Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Georgetown, Delaware

Rome

Paris

ON APRIL 29, 1951, Kingsley Amis complained in a note to Philip Larkin about a slew of mediocre new novels he had been reading. He singled out Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing for especial contempt. "The most inconclusive book I have ever read," Amis called it. "The sort of book where you…

Berlin

PEOPLE OFTEN USE THE WORD "culture" as a synonym for "cuisine." When they claim to adore the "diverse and vibrant culture" of the city they live in, what they're actually trying to say, nine times out of ten, is that they like kung pao chicken. Those of us who grew up in Massachusetts often hear…

WHEN THE RUSSIAN ARMY CHASED Napoleon's troops all the way back to Paris in 1814, the occupiers were not just tolerated but welcomed. They were chic. The empress Josephine herself went riding with the young czar. The locals seemed to delight in subjugation, the more undignified, the better. "We…

London

"THIS CONSTITUTION," SAID French president Jacques Chirac in mid-April, "is in its way, a daughter of French thought." He was talking about the 448-article constitutional treaty (the U.S. Constitution has 7 articles) that is meant to bind the 25 countries of the European Union into something like a…

Malmö, Sweden

Amsterdam

PROBABLY NO ARTICLE has traveled more miles on the Internet this season than the cri de coeur that the novelist Jane Smiley wrote for Slate 24 hours after the election. Using her supposedly Bush-supporting relatives in Missouri as evidence, Smiley chalked the election results up to the "ignorance…

THE AFTERNOON of Election Day in Washington, one of the Dutch journalists in town to cover the vote mentioned to me that there had been a spectacular killing in Amsterdam that morning, which would be international news as soon as the dust cleared from the Bush-Kerry contest. True enough. Most of…

Strasbourg

SELDOM HAS THE COURSE of European history been changed by a non-politician's throwaway remark in a German-language newspaper on a Wednesday in the dead of the summer doldrums. But on July 28, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told the conservative Hamburg-based daily Die Welt that Europe would be…

New York

New York

THE TALK OF THE GARDEN last night was Arnold Schwarzenegger's exuberant tribute to the American freedom that first drew him to fame and fortune in California. Every other pundit compared his oratory to Ronald Reagan's. Many Republicans criticized the organizers for failing to end the evening on…

What a role reversal. After a Boston convention in which Democrats delivered a simple message ("We Like the Army") with the discipline of a Prussian military drill, Republicans--if Night One in New York is any indication--are following up with improv night at the coffee house. The GOP on display is…

Boston

THE RED SOX were playing the Angels in Anaheim last Sunday. I tuned in on the Internet with Boston one run down in the sixth, just moments before future Massachusetts governor David Ortiz drilled a three-run homer to right. A hollow silence usually descends over the ballpark at such a reversal,…

Istanbul