Watching Jon Stewart use Capn’ Crunch as the logo for climate cap and trade regulation the other night started me thinking about the need for our society to get more sophisticated about its understanding of economics, policy, and science. My reaction to the pitiful state of our public policy dialogue is what you might expect Read More
I think I may have missed something important in my initial take on the assault and attempted kidnapping of Elie Wiesel by a Holocaust denier. Are you familiar with this Feb. 1 incident? Don’t be surprised if you missed it; for some reason, this emblematic outrage has been largely ignored by the media.
Perhaps the Read More
The last decade and more of American public life will be remembered, among other things, for the triumph of euphemism. Not only did bellicosity become “moral clarity” and military invasion turn into the promotion of freedom, but many issues on the domestic front were strategically rebranded as well: Religious charities became “faith-based initiatives,” netting in Read More
Henry Ford had a better idea. Three of them, in fact. He didn’t invent the internal-combustion engine, but his four-cylinder, 20-horsepower Model T—Brewster green in the early years, then black and only black—became the “universal car” of the 1910’s and 20’s. “No man making a good salary will be unable to own one,” Ford promised. Read More
Automobile heiress and etiquette maven Charlotte Ford is in the midst of a Southampton holiday house-swap. The daughter of the late Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company dynasty and the author of 21st-Century Etiquette just listed her sprawling Southampton estate for $15 million in November, a month after she purchased a modest one-acre Read More
In early April 1953, a gangling man with a lantern jaw stood alongside a shorter dark-skinned man in high meadow outside Thyangboche, Nepal, studying the way to the northeast. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa were seven weeks away from becoming household names, and 50 years later the celebrations of Everest’s conquest have already Read More
