Latest work
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Wear gloves, Mr. Orwell
Read more: Wear gloves, Mr. OrwellStranded British truckers, barred from entering the EU when COVID tests failed to arrive, lined up to spell out their message. The following account, while fictional, is based on two newspaper dispatches, one Frencch, another Polish. Details have been altered but the spirit of the dispatches, on the subject of…
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Qizzard
Read more: QizzardHieronymus Bosch’s “The Magician,” a replica of which hangs in the Musée Municipal in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. For now, the museum is closed on Fear’s orders. Qizzard, the lofty magician of my French fable book, cured lepers by means of magic dust and applause. He’d gathered the gnarled into an assembly, then…
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The underground man
Read more: The underground manFatal beauty: A detail from Robert Wiles’s photo of 23-year-old Evelyn McHale, who jumped to her death from the 86th-floor of the Empire State Building in May 1947. Seeking refuge from the bullying perils of adolescence, I often retreated to my outpost on high, the top of a telephone pole…
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Thoughts on gender
Read more: Thoughts on genderTravel writer Jan Morris, born James Humphry Morris, 1926-2020. Iread little in my teens. Here and there a book about baseball while dabbling in my father’s set-aside novels, books by Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell, the latter’s exoticism carrying me later toward poetry. I also liked travel pieces by the…
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Uncle Joe’s heavy burden
Read more: Uncle Joe’s heavy burdenAfter nearly 50 years in politics, Joe Biden can finally say mission accomplished. Joe Biden may or may not ably and effectively manage the ever more bumptious United States, but what matters for now is the prevailing sense that unlike his soon-to-be predecessor he is a stable and decent man.…
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Liberally lucky
Read more: Liberally luckySafe, safe, safe…. or something terrible will happen. It began with relentlessly recycled footage of a hijacked commercial jet slamming into a New York City skyscraper, followed by a second jet and people leaping from upper floor windows, after which came the unthinkable sight of the two towers collapsing. Adults…
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