56

October 12, 2007

For an earlier generation of American dissidents from the prevailing ideology of left-liberalism, a rite of passage was reading Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which appeared in 1943. William F. Buckley was hardly alone in seeing it as a seminal text crucial to his personal formation.

57

January 27, 2010

58

November 23, 2007

Environmentalism, it’s been said, is the ideological luxury of city dwellers in modern life, for anyone who lives outside an urban or suburban environment knows the truth: nature is vicious and cruel and works relentlessly to make the life of man a living Hell.

59

March 31, 2009

60

April 28, 2005

Everyone has heard something described as a Rube Goldberg machine, and most of us know what this means: some crazy convoluted way of accomplishing a task that would otherwise be quite simple. That’s how Webster’s defines it. The phase most often applies to overly complicated software but it was also applied to the Clinton health care plan and might also be applied to emerging Social Security reform.

61

January 16, 2009

At a taped video interview in my office, before the crew would start the camera, a man had to remove my Picasso prints from the wall. The prints are probably under copyright, they said.

But the guy who drew them died 30 years ago. Besides, they are mine.

Doesn’t matter. They have to go.

62

November 21, 2008

These are times when you just feel like yelling at the people who write the news, particularly the business press. They are happy to report, word for word, what the Fed and Treasury Department tell them, and their message is always the same: hey, it’s not our fault; in fact, we are fixing the problem!

63

July 20, 2009

Somehow the movie Wall Street (1987) still holds up after all these years. Sure, the technology is dated—the cell phones are hilariously huge and the fat-back screens in offices display only green digits—but it hardly matters. The clothing by Alan Flusser is of course amazing and holds up too, but the real merit here runs deeper than appearances alone.

64

September 21, 2009

Film noir is not riding any wave of popularity, so it is the perfect time to anticipate a trend. These movies from the 1940s are not only brilliant and beautiful but also entertaining in their own right. They look completely different to us now from what they must have looked like then, and I don’t mean merely to inspire a sentimentalism for days gone by.

65

November 22, 2007

It took twice through, but I’m finally convinced; Beowulf is a wonderful film. There would be plenty to recommend it, even if it had stuck to the original plot line.