The other day I stepped into an elevator while wearing a hat. Seeing ladies in the elevator, I removed my hat. One of the ladies, who was of a certain age, complimented me on my manners. "Not many men would know to do that nowadays." Not many men need to. As someone or other has... Read More

Scowling out at me from my New York Post is Steven Hayes, recently convicted in an exceptionally vile crime in my neighbor state of Connecticut. With another man, not yet tried, Hayes invaded a family home, clubbed the father senseless, then raped, tortured, strangled, and burned alive the wife and two daughters. He has been... Read More

What a place it is, this world we humans have made! It has such variety, such abundance of skills and knowledge, so many aspects one never thinks of from one year's end to the next till they are suddenly forced on one's attention. Consider, for example, glass. Over the past three or four years, windows... Read More

The Tyler Clementi case has been illuminating in several respects. Clementi was a freshman student at Rutgers University, sharing a dorm room with another 18-year-old, Dharun Ravi. Clementi asked for sole use of the room until midnight on September 19. Ravi obliged and went to his girlfriend's room, but not before activating his webcam. With... Read More

The 1924 presidential election was, on the face of it, a snoozer. The major-party candidates were Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democrat). Both were conservative — sensationally so by today's standards. As Garland Tucker notes in this enjoyable and informative book: "There were … very few philosophical differences between Davis and Coolidge." Both... Read More

August lived up to its reputation as the Silly Season this year, the news dominated for several days by JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, who quit his job August 9 in a sensational manner, venting his grievances over the plane's PA system then exiting via the emergency chute. (Fortunately the plane was stationary on the... Read More

In the way these things happen, we had a sudden deluge of education stories this past few days. For this Long Islander the news was both local, state, and national. Our local news concerned a school district referendum on spending $2m to add buildings to our intermediate school (grades 4-6). The backstory here is that... Read More

The recent political ructions over the extension of unemployment benefit brought Norman Tebbit to my mind. Tebbit was Margaret Thatcher's Secretary of State for Employment in the early 1980s. There was some urban rioting, and it was suggested to Tebbit that these disturbances were a natural response to the indignity of unemployment. Tebbit, whose origins... Read More

For some time I had wanted to meet James Buckley, fourth of the ten in his generation. (Bill Buckley was sixth.) This man had an extraordinary career. He served at a high level in all three branches of the federal government: as a U.S. senator, as an undersecretary of state, and as a federal appeals... Read More

In the dismaying-but-not-surprising category of news stories recently, this one in the July 2 New York Times got my attention. It describes how the Obama administration is killing off the summer internship programs, many of them unpaid, that are so popular with high school seniors and college students. Sample quotes: One reason this got my... Read More

The first federal regulator I ever knew was a fellow named Ernie. This was 40 years ago, a few weeks after I'd first landed on these shores. I'd run out of money and taken work as kitchen help at a small family firm in New Rochelle, New York. The firm made frozen kosher TV dinners.... Read More

Fleet Week! For a few days the rather distinctly un-military inhabitants of New York City find that in hurrying from one commercial deal to another, one fashion show to another, one dinner party to another, one charity fundraiser, poetry slam, book-launch party, gallery show, clubbing excursion, coffee-klatch, or private debauch to another, they are sharing... Read More

Front page headline in my New York Post this morning: The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: "A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48... Read More

The science news this month was dominated by two genome stories. An organism's genome is the sum total of all its genetic information — its DNA. In sexually reproducing species, a child gets half its genome from one parent, half from the other. Asexual organisms like bacteria just copy DNA from one generation to the... Read More

Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley wrote a story titled "Protection" whose first-person protagonist acquires a guardian angel. The angel is actually a validusian derg — an invisible, immaterial being from another plane of existence, present only as a voice in one's head. The derg's sole satisfaction is to keep a human being safe from harm.... Read More

Michael Bloomberg, New York City's Mayor-for-Life, has announced that the city will not go ahead with a publicly-funded CCT program. A what? "CCT" stands for "Conditional Cash Transfer," the current fad among anti-poverty campaigners. The name, unusually for social-policy onomastics, clearly describes the program. Cash ($$$$) is transferred (from some funding source, most likely an... Read More

Third Thursday of the month, in season, is club night — the meeting, that is, of my gents' dinner club in New York City. We are a heterogeneous crowd: lawyers, doctors, writers, academics, a violinist, an ex-diplomat, some finance types. The club's been in business for decades. Bill Buckley was a member, showing up at... Read More

It is a commonplace observation that very smart people often have no sense. Writers since Aristophanes have been making sport of their intellectual superiors. Jonathan Swift had the academicians of Lagado striving to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Twenty years ago Paul Johnson wrote a fine book titled Intellectuals, in which he tossed and gored such... Read More

My breakfast-time reading matter of choice, the New York Post, has regular stories about long-separated friends, lovers, and family members who find one another via Google. Here's one: High School Sweethearts Rekindle Romance After 50 Years. The boy and girl were parted by a ruse of their parents, who disapproved. Half a century on, he... Read More

We — we, National Review — seem to have been talking a lot about exceptionalism this last couple of print issues. It started in the March 8 issue. The cover piece, by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, was a spirited defense of American exceptionalism, with some warnings about how the current administration's policies threaten it.... Read More

"All those years we thought we were building communism! Actually they've built communism right here in the U.S.A.!" This gets the biggest laugh of the evening. All seven of us in the room laugh, including me, the only non-Chinese. Someone quotes one of Chairman Mao's tremendous Thoughts, "We should pay close attention to the well-being... Read More

"The parking brake, honey. Parking brake." "Sorry, Dad." She releases the parking brake and we move out into our quiet suburban street. Signaling, she drives nicely to the corner, stops, looks, and makes a graceful turn in the direction of the village. Coming up to her 17th birthday, my daughter will soon take her driving... Read More

Thomas Friedman has been to China again, and seems to have experienced another Lincoln Steffens moment. More than one such, in fact. In his January 10 New York Times column Tom was swooning over the new high-speed rail link between Peking and Shanghai — five hours to cover 700 miles. "By comparison, Amtrak trains require... Read More

What shall I do to be saved? Well, I might try uploading the contents of my brain to some more durable substrate. If I survive another 30 years, this will be a real option, according to Ray Kurzweil, leading light of the Singularity movement. Singularitarians believe that galloping progress in computer technology and brain science... Read More

I find myself increasingly oppressed by the feeling that our big national policies are not merely mistaken, but deeply irrational. Take the president's recent "jobs summit." Like several other people — Pat Buchanan for example — I was baffled by the absence of any talk about limiting immigration. As Pat points out: Beats me, Pat;... Read More