Americans breathed a sigh of disappointment last week when the promised super-heavyweight bout between Joe Biden and Donald Trump stalled after the weigh-in trash talk. “They asked me, would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no,” Biden said as he stripped to his trunks. “I said, ‘If we were in high school, […]
By Dominic Green
“Twenty-first century people shouldn’t be governed by eighteenth-century laws,” was the slogan on one of the home-made placards I saw in Boston yesterday morning. The placard was carried by a high-schooler, one of the hundreds of thousands of young people who rallied for March For Our Lives across the country. She was invoking one eighteenth-century […]
By Dominic Green
Yesterday, Donald Trump went to New Hampshire, the ‘Granite State’ or, as he calls it, a ‘drug-infested den’. He has launched an initiative against prescription opioid addiction, and would like to execute drug dealers. He has not specified whether he would prefer to do this in the manner of Dirty Harry, or by a legal […]
By Dominic Green
Remember Nudge? It was a 2008 book by Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, full of bright technocratic ideas for using ‘choice architecture’ to ‘nudge’ the plebs to make the ‘right’ decisions. The Guardian’s reviewer called it ‘never intimidating, always amusing, and elucidating: a jolly economic romp with serious lessons within’. On […]
By Dominic Green
It was only Seven Days in Entebbe, but it felt like an eternity. The rescue in July 1976 by Israeli commandos of 102 Jewish and Israeli hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda was a scriptwriter’s dream: a three-act drama of crisis, complication and resolution, in which the good guys won—good […]
By Dominic Green
For Donald Trump, yesterday was a bad day to bury good news. While Rex Tillerson’s resignation as Secretary of State dominated the headlines, the biggest and most important story of the day came from Devin Nunes and the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Their news was good for Trump, and very bad indeed for […]
By Dominic Green
The World Wide Web is twenty-nine years’ old today, according to its Dr. Frankenstein, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Or is that false news? Sir Tim, like Frankenstein before the monster gets ideas of its own, is proud of his creation. In an open letter, a kind of philosophical birthday card, Berners-Lee notes that 2018 is ‘a […]
By Dominic Green
These days, the political climes of the United States are deeply unhappy. The weather, as if endorsing the pathetic fallacy of the historical schema, is miserable too. Caught by the snow in New York this week, I thought I would dry off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Under the pseudo-Classical portico and past the […]
By Dominic Green
The AIPAC conference, that annual celebration of the triangular romance between America, Israel and American Jews, concluded last night with the traditional protestations of undying love, democratic compatibility and common values. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s identity crisis deepens, and a redefinition of the goals of the American-Israeli relationship looms. AIPAC is studiously bipartisan, but the maladroit policies […]
By Dominic Green
It was always going to be difficult for this year’s Oscars to balance politics and entertainment, the sweeping declaration with the plunging cleavage. The host, Jimmy Kimmel, got through his opening routine well enough, and without showing his cleavage either, but the strain was already showing. The décor and the script were like a moral […]
By Dominic Green
Tomorrow night, TV viewers will take to their couches for a night of Hollywood glamour, razzmatazz and gross hypocrisy. A bunch of vain halfwits who make millions waving guns around or taking off their clothes will preach to us about gun control and sexual morality. Yes, it’s the 493rd annual Oscar Awards. I have the […]
By Dominic Green
Bruce Springsteen promised that he was ‘Born To Run’, and now, like Judy Garland and Ethel Merman before him, he is running on Broadway—and running, and running. From last October to early February, the workingman’s tribune performed five nights a week at the Walter Kerr Theatre, his tools a piano, an acoustic guitar, and a […]
By Dominic Green
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous — the blarney, stoned — but Ginsberg stole the aesthetic victory by reading ‘Wales Visitation’, a homage to William Blake. ‘White fog lifting and falling on mountain brow,’ Ginsberg intones, ‘…teeming ferns/ exquisitely swayed/ along a […]
By Dominic Green
