2018
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Sight at a loss for words
Detail from “Self-Portrait With Straw Hat,” Vincent Van Gogh, 1887. Living through glaucoma’s nuclear winter recalibrates the visual metaphors on…
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Remember the outhouse
As recently as the 1930s, large swathes of America were abject and filthy poor. The United States is an insular…
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The Green Knight
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984: a meaningful friendship. My favorite literature professor retired soon after I graduated but…
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The colour of power
In 2013, Italy’s south was mostly split between Berlusconi (blue) and the Five Star Movement (yellow). This time the landscape…
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Zitná Y2K
A table for two in Prague, 18 years ago. He has it all rehearsed. He’s been mapping it out all…
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Present arms
Racist gatherings and lynching ended only when the U.S. saw an opportunity to look all the more like the “chosen”…
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Bleach and wag
Not satisfied the first time? Try bleach. Donald Trump is a literalist. He misspells words not to spite the language…
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Scrap speaks
Democratic Party leader Maurizio Martina can’r avoid the shadow cast by Matteo Renzi, who resigned in March after an election…
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Making pulp
If you made it, I can unmake it… There is nothing one president made that another cannot dismantle, or try…
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Legends
What mattered to National Geographic’s editors wasn’t the potency of images, which often spoke for themselves, but words that would…
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Lions and tigers, and numbers
Numero 77, numero sei, numero 77… The woman’s voice began early this morning and every few minutes has repeated the…
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Good times, and bad
For The Times, the Lega Nord’s Matteo Salvini is “a sweatshirt-wearing member of Parliament who has turned what was the…
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Honoring words
Sergio Mattarella’s very legal “no.” Casual borrowing of meaningful political and ideological concepts can push sane debate toward ill-advised fringes…
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Whimpers before roars
Now, say some, the EU is the master and Italy the slave. Reverse American history for a moment. Think of…
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A special sundae school
Ice cream can be a great political preamble. Butterscotch has a political side. You just need to listen for it.…
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Fortuneteller
Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen in “Network.” At the height of post-Nixon era disenchantment about politics, politicians and America’s seemingly…
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Fleeing carbonation
At many Rome restaurants of the 1960s, if you wanted still water , there was only one option. Rome slept…
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Ascendance complete
Professeur Tryphon Tournesol from the French comic book series Tintin by Hergé. My mother once knew a physicist she purposely…
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After the boardwalk
The boardwalk meant cotton candy on the sly, and finagling pizza. Taffy in Funland, salt water endless to the east,…
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Artificial flavoring
Light at the end of the tunnel, Rembrandt-style. My American bank recently sent me a good-natured message about the many…
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Xanax in love
What happens when the lifeboats stop working? She said I should forget it. All of it. Everything she’d just said.…
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Arguing with testosterone
Victoria’s secret? Not all are sworn to find it. My testosterone is in a funk. Gnome-like, it trolls through stories…
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The raging down below
September’s Hurricane Florence had a northward urge, perhaps appropriately. Hurricanes are the stars of America’s mean season, implacably brutal knuckles…
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The new milkmen
The Trump milkman is another breed of man. As a young journalist in the mid-1970s I tried hard to emulate…
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Italy’s phantom money
Italy wants to spend more for ostensibly noble reasons, but does it really have the cash. The numbers say “no.”…
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Friend of the dead
Working the police beat and toting up casualties could earn you a nickname you tried living up to. We liked…
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Freeway Flyer
Once upon a time, a bike, not a phone, afforded youth a sense of personal freedom. In the fall of…
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Thus wrote Crilloffer
Once, your only mark was what your hand produced. And only the few were trained to make them. Why should…
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Ruth
The goings on at Studio 54, just down the street, alarmed Ruth to the point of panic. My aunt’s friend…
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The Turk
Windows to the soul? Not when they break… There is a temperature display regulated by a button with up and…
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Yuletide spacemen
The crew of Apollo 8, Frank F. Borman II, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders, took turns reading…
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Last vanity
In pre-war Warsaw and Rome of 1940 (above and below), the author’s mother ensured she was camera-friendly. I never liked…
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