2014
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Vortex fever
The Polar Vortex, emphasis on the V. Why the fascination with weather, with the cold bite of polar air or…
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Kid Charlemagne
Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s president, Prime Minister Erico Letta and new Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi: a shape-shifting left. Today’s Italian…
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Ignoring Amazon
Slacks would prefer not to hear about Rip Van Winkle, fearing the rip. The opposite of conspicuous consumption is reviving…
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Incidon and Ixel
In the Winter War between Russia and Finland, 150,000 died, a third because of the conditions. She tells me she’s…
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Cesspool
Grillo: Raging against the machine, even if it means knowing rage only. Italy’s view of political criticism was long reined…
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On the make
Matteo Renzi: the most boyish-looking of plotters. Formalities aside, Italy’s new prime minister is 39-year-old former Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi,…
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Kiev porn
Medieval war colors in Kiev. We are poised between two worlds. One is feral, primal, and ripe for sudden fury;…
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Jack R. Payton
Jack Payon and the author in the Via Della Dataria offices of United Press International, which long ago closed its…
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Lights, camera, crisis
Shoot first; build passion; distribute the image. The abiding back-and-forth over Ukraine is helping to flesh out how global crisis…
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Flight 370
In 2009, after several false leads, the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 was finally found after five days. Several…
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Dressed to kill
L’Wren Scott. The scope and intensity of true privacy is ferocious, more so even than vanity. It is, or can…
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Bad words
Rancorous insults do little to better a bad situation, and can trigger domestic resistance. In speaking shrilly about Ukraine, both…
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Juxtapoised
Elsa Peretti by Helmut Newton, 1975. Midway down a busy street a vagrant forages through a green dumpster topped with…
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Poof
In search of the meaning of the universe. The secret of the universe was at the foot of a fenced-off…
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Yackson and Reean
Streets closed at rush hour often for weeks at a time. Human trends generally come in three sizes, amusing, exasperating…
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The pendant
Seeking and finding are galaxies apart, except in the imagination. You are a traveler and you lose a precious pendant.…
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Chiuso
Giuseppe Pellizza’s “Il Quarto Stato” (“The Fourth Estate”), 1901. Iadore the unthinkably beautiful inefficiency that characterizes my Rome neighborhood on…
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Lame duck III
Renzi: a party putsch to get to the top. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has a pebble in his shoe, an…
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Her master’s voice
Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman in “I Dream of Jeannie”: what’s a master to do? In the mid-1960s American television…
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Time out
The argument about when to close cuts deeper than a mere haircut. In a Rome barbershop Alfredo and Pino are…
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Jason
Having a road race set meant explaining how it worked to your father. Jason, the 11-year-old boy to whom I’ve…
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Eyes cast downward
Picasso’s “Guernica” was an artistic admonishment against fascism. In a masterfully argued essay published in May by The New Republic, political…
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Chance of severe thunderstorms
In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran and a decade-long war followed, since the two armies canceled each other out. In 2003,…
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Network
In the 1970s, watching RAI1 and its news programs meant getting the government line. The Italian TV news world I…
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Dirge
The first hard knocks of 1914 didn’t seem at an incipient death sentence. Attending a funeral at the start of…
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Sexy Shoes
Getting stilettos in Rome doesn’t come with sales clerks asking how your day has been so far. Just after Christmas,…
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Una corea
For decades, the loss to North Korean endured as an Italian national embarrassment. On July 19, 1966, Italy faced lowly…
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Ratty opinion
The downing of Malaysian airliner has opened the door to predictable but unfortunate hyperbole. If there was once a cardinal…
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Tooken, then stricken
Being tooken can mean being had, which can leave you and your chest strickened. Among the hardest arguments to sustain…
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Kid Napoleon
Napoleon in high form: Epaulette is a French word that means “little shoulder” (diminutive from épaule, which means “shoulder”). The…
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Motherland
The boardwalk was a happy place, unless you read the headlines. Some contemporary historians have used the 100th anniversary of…
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August
The boardwalk was a happy place, unless you read the headlines. In 1968, I spent two summer weeks in August…
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War games
Heinous acts once fostered declarations of war, but that was before the advent of casualty arithmetic. Postmodernism in the context…
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Rotation
History loves recurrence. History is not a pilgrim’s progress. It’s a Ferris wheel with gondolas that rotate endlessly. It does…
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Another free trial
Whether the question is about North Korean children or Netflix free offers, the answer is half-truth. Netflix is sorry that…
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Holes
Madrid’s manmade lake is called the Estanque. In another place and time, late summer was when Vincienta and Gabby took…
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Sister Marta
One shot a day in a universe far, far away. Little things tell you when nostalgia wants out of cliché’s…
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Wish you were here!
Why stop with a probe? India should colonize Mars. The world is distracted. There’s ISIS and the headless, Ukraine and…
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Scusi
No phone; no app; just a map. The hackneyed phrase is time standing still. But there she is, a girl…
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Ebola
Ebola’s flexible filaments, which some saw as resembling question marks, others spaghetti. Dates help formulate perspective. The passage of time…
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Out of Africa
Cable TV, newspapers and the web have become glad fear-mongerers. In the chaotic phase that followed the September 11 terrorist…
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Zitti!
Organ grinder in Rome of the 1950s. Rome has cancer of the air. The louder humans get, the louder their…
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Inky
Blotted hands were a rite of passage. You sleep with a woman who in the morning steps out of the…
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Silent running
Iam fit for the mission to Saturn. I have been examined by experts and told that my health is not…
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No place for a pony
Fiction is exciting, the real thing more banal. Political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to…
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Girlfriend Studies
Cheerful Frances, too tall to marry. Girlfriend Studies seems to have acquired interdisciplinary status based on the number of independent…
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La zingara
Keep a horn handy. My mother was superstitious, a trait she said she’d acquired from her Polish father, whom she…
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‘Breaking shit’
Whitman meets Weimar, minus poetry. We live in an era in which both written and spoken language gets most attention…
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La Vita Ingrata
Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and his character Marcello Rubin were bitterness incarnate. It was on the outskirts of Rome in…
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P-/retty p-/lease
Before computerized pagination, word surgery was by X-Acto knife. Hyphenation once ruled my life. That “cat” read “cat” and not…
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My flood
How to explain? Iwas not weaned on literalism. My parents did their best. They decorated Christmas trees and introduced the…
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Big top blues
Welcome to the politics of noise, and above to entertainment at all costs. I was a Boy Scout in Washington,…
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Devil’s advocate
Putin and Crimea: not as premeditated as some pundits suggest. The dogs of war and the words of war can…
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History matters
The Russian Black Sea Fleet was once a point of pride for Russian influence. Imperial Russia’s most significant early shortcoming…
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Robin Williams
One man; acres of competing personalities. I lived outside Italy for the better part of the 1970s and 1980s, and…
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