Posts in International
Words Worth Noting - March 6, 2025

“Business is taboo at the dinner table, but crime and criminals aren’t, and the Rosenberg case hogged the conversation all through the anchovy fritters, partridge in casserole with no olives in the sauce, cucumber mousse, and Creole curds and cream. Of course it was academic, since the Rosenbergs had been dead for years, but the young princes had been dead for five centuries, and [Nero] Wolfe had once spent a week investigating that case, after which he removed More’s Utopia from his bookshelves because More had framed Richard III.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy; Wolfe had been reading Invitation to an Inquest and had ordered a transcript of the trial.

The far vague media

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the press should try to understand the rise of populism instead of reflexively smearing parties like the AfD as “far-right” without any attention to their program, the meaning of that insult, or the nature of their appeal, as if the job of the media were to censor rather than explain.

Words Worth Noting - February 26, 2025

“The man who says there are no sexes or no nations fares simply and precisely like the man who says there are no chairs and tables. He falls over them.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News November 8, 1913 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024) [and yes, he gave this warning over a century ago, yet again proving eerily prescient]