Archive for December 2017

By Luke Haines Call this controversial, but I’d like to thank this week’s attempted suicide bomber in New York. I know, I know. “Crazy Liberal THANKS Muslim suicide bomber,” they’ll cry. It’s just… it’s been a tough year, y’know? We’re all tense and stressed by the political situations at home and abroad, climate change is…

By Michael Jay Tucker I write this, in my head, as I walk my dog in the park not far from my house. It is a pleasant afternoon. December is quite nice in the area in which I live. Winter only really starts here in January. So, at the moment, it is lovely, crisp day,…

By Luke Haines It’s interesting how national stereotypes find their way into strange places. While America has its big, bombastic, flashy political meltdown in the form of Donald Trump, Britain has been busy with its own more understated, slow paced version in the form of Brexit. Think of Brexit as being like the original British…

By Luke Haines, British Editor. Next time you have a bad day at work, spare a thought for William LeMessurier. In 1979, LeMessurier received an enquiry from an architecture student about the CitiGroup building in Manhattan, on which he’d been Chief Engineer. The student was asking if there was any truth to her professor’s assertion…

By Michael Jay Tucker By the time you read this, I will be in China. I’m going to attend a friend’s wedding. And, no, I’ve never been to China before. I have very little idea what to expect. I’ve queried all my friends who’ve traveled there, and bought a book or two, and, even so,…

By Luke Haines, British Editor. Billy Bush is back, ladies and gentlemen! The… beige… sheep…? Is that a thing? The Beige Sheep of the family? …Like, the most unremarkable one? The Beige Sheep of the Bush family is back in the headlines after sensationally revealing that Donald Trump from the now-infamous “Bus Tape” was the…

By Michael Jay Tucker Actually, the title isn’t mine. I stole it from (of all people) Business Week magazine which, in 1931, supposedly ran a story entitled “Do You Still Believe In Lazy Fairies?”  This was in response to the Great Depression and how folks were a bit appalled by the government’s seeming inaction. I…

By Michael Jay Tucker It is amazing what you learn about a nation from its art. Or, even, just its writings about art. Take White Fear, for instance… And hatred. Which seem to be eating our poor America alive. * It’s like this. A while back, I was reading The New York Review Of Books.…

By Michael Jay Tucker The other day, we ran a short article about Der Drumpf’s behavior at a ceremony honoring the Navajo Code Talkers. He was an idiot, of course. He used the opportunity to attack his personal enemies, and he used language that was fairly clearly racist…and insulting to the very people he was…