Well, I succeeded in keeping off the net for three days. The flight to Arizona, which I had been slightly dreading because of fears that my two children would be driven to the point of insanity by 9+ hours on a plane, actually went very smoothly. Both of them (the smug father will let you […]

It will probably be a few days until my next posting–as I think I mentioned earlier, I’m off to visit my wife’s family (well, now mine as well) in Arizona.It will probably do no harm to be away from a warm laptop for a few days. Aside from what damage having a mildly radioactive device […]

Someone (St. Fintan O’Toole of D’Olier Street?) recently pointed out that the paradox of Pope John Paul II’s reign was that he was a fierce anti-Communist who kept control over his organization with a grip that would put General Jaruzelski to shame*.To flog the slightly divisive comparison, I wonder if, with the election of Pope […]

Martin McDonagh’s play, “The Pillowman,” which isn’t newly written but is new to Broadway, is receiving rave reviews from a wide range of American critics. I’m dubious about the acclaim. The grounds for my scepticism is slightly shaky—I’ve only seen one of McDonagh’s plays, “The Lonesome West,” a few years ago but I was taken […]

James Howard Kunstler is an entertainingly cranky writer based in the upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs. He is inordinately fond of the adjective ‘necrotic’ when describing the contemporary American landscape, he maintains a blog with the somewhat no-holds-barred title of Clusterfuck Nation, and has just written a book that predicts that many of […]

There’s a pretty nausea-inducing article about the influence of the super-rich in the recent edition of New York magazine (not to be confused with The New Yorker, which usually affects a patrician disdain for the discussion of moolah). Anyway the gist of the obsequious piece is that the ultra rich may provoke envy, may be […]

In the bookshop the other day I saw a book called Hitler’s Piano Player. While I don’t doubt that the book is well researched etc., the title alone seemed like an unintentional satirical jibe at the Hitler industry. In a few years (unless they’ve already appeared of course), the barrel will doubtlessly be further scraped […]

An article about the Chinese labour force, of all things, has not just made me further question the ambiguous legacy of John Paul II but the whole relationship between “goodness” on the individual level and well-being on the mass level. The article, which appeared earlier this week in the New York Times, suggested that: The […]

Twenty minutes ago I saw the headline “Author Saul Bellow Dies at 89.” Paradoxically, his age and the length of his career* made his demise all the more startling–he seemed like such a fixture in the literary firmament that the issue of his mortality somehow seemed beside the point. But in the days to come […]