ArcaMax

In April of 1937, the war planes of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy chose a market day to bomb a Basque town, one of the first times a civilian population was deliberately targeted. Pablo Picasso, a native of Spain, quickly reacted by depicting the horror in his famous mural named for the town, "Guernica." It was finished by June. If he were ...Read more

The Economist, a fine British newsmagazine, is rarely wrong, but it was recently in strongly suggesting that the casual disregard for truth that is the very soul of Donald Trump's campaign is something new under the sun. The technology -- tweets and such -- certainly is, but his cascade of immense lies certainly is not. I'd like to familiarize ...Read more

NEW YORK -- Frank Luntz, the Republican political consultant, is a master of the political epigram. Under his tutelage the estate tax became the death tax and global warming became climate change. So Luntz, once again going to the heart of the matter, recently put an either-or question to a group of about 50 people: What would you rather see, ...Read more

Some time ago, the public intellectual Milton Himmelfarb put his finger on what the current presidential campaign is all about. Referring to his fellow Jews, he said that they "earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans." Never mind the rearview mirror of PC tut-tutness, what Himmelfarb had observed was that not all the people all the ...Read more

Back when I worked for the claims department of a major insurance company, I got stuff. Some of the stuff consisted of tickets to Broadway shows and sporting events and sometimes I got bottles of booze, Canadian Club being a popular choice for some reason. These items were tendered to me by auto appraisers, repair shops and other firms, large ...Read more

At the time Germany signed the armistice ending World War I, no battles had been fought on its territory and no foreign army had invaded it. The German people suffered greatly -- food shortages and the like -- but defeat to many did not seem to come from the battlefield in front but from traitorous civilians from behind. This came to be known as...Read more

The other night, I went to a dinner party. The guests were all friends of mine -- a scattering of writers and some business people -- and we talked about the ouster of Roger Ailes amid a sexual harassment scandal and wondered why he was awarded a multimillion-dollar settlement and we talked about the travails of his boss, that incredibly ...Read more

PARIS -- I awake to brilliant sunshine. It is a glorious day here on the Left Bank, a short walk from the storied cafe Les Deux Magots where I'm told Hemingway has preceded me. What shall I do today? There is a wonderful exhibition of Picasso sculptures at the Picasso Museum and one of contemporary Chinese art at the Louis Vuitton Foundation and...Read more

Donald Trump betrays the betrayed.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Trump accurately and forcibly identified his core constituency and explained his candidacy:

"Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored and abandoned. I have visited the ...Read more

What if Hillary Clinton were a man? What if she were a 68-year-old man rather than a 68-year-old woman? Would we think differently of her? Her raised voice would be lower. She would be better at physically commanding the stage. Her indomitability might be seen as manly. If she were taller and bigger, might she have been able to get away with ...Read more

Calvin Trillin, the Mark Twain of our times, once wrote that sooner or later in a new administration, he starts to miss the preceding one. I know precisely how he feels. I already miss the Obama administration.

I am not being precipitous. The next president of the United States is going to be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Neither one has ...Read more

Just as there was never any doubt that Bill Clinton had sex with "that woman," there was never any doubt that Hillary Clinton mishandled her emails. And just as there was never any doubt that the Republicans overreacted to Bill Clinton's shenanigans, so too is there no doubt that they have done the same over Hillary's server. Something about the...Read more

What shall we call the butterfly?

The butterfly I have in mind is the one that illustrates chaos theory: It flutters its diaphanous wings, stirring the slightest breeze, which connects with others until, thousands of miles away, it forms the essential ingredient for a hurricane. Can we call this butterfly Brexit?

I mean, why not? It qualifies....Read more

For the Trump kids, it may be time for another meeting with dad. A previous one resulted in the canning of Corey Lewandowski and his exiling to CNN. Since then, the plight of the Trump campaign has become even more dire: Donald Trump has fallen in the polls and he made a perfect fool of himself in Scotland, possibly a personal best. Now, though,...Read more

My heroes are not necessarily people of great ability but ones who did what I think I could not. Two contemporary men fall into that category. The first is the late Muhammad Ali, maybe the greatest fighter of all time, and the second is John McCain. Now, from the grave, Ali reprimands McCain.

Both Ali and McCain chose to make sacrifices on ...Read more

A man walks into a nightclub with an AR-15. It is similar to the weapon I was trained on in the Army. It was designed for combat, to kill as many of the enemy as possible in the shortest amount of time. I was pretty good with it, even earned a marksmanship badge, but when the training was over and we returned to the barracks, our weapons were ...Read more