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The most memorable speech that Queen Elizabeth II ever gave was five years before her coronation. It was delivered in 1947 on a radio broadcast from South Africa, where she was on a royal tour with her parents and her sister. The occasion was her 21st birthday. Nowadays a 21st birthday is a milestone marking
READ MORE“Semi-fascist.” That’s one more medallion to add to my string of honorable and not-so-honorable titles. Semi-fascism is the label President Joe Biden slapped on Donald Trump’s MAGA philosophy in a late August speech. Supporters of Trump are now apparently enemies of the state who despise the Constitution. Which means that about half of American voters
READ MORESometimes events converge in my life and explode into revelation. A few weeks ago, I edited an interview with Elizabeth Spalding, one of the founders and now the director of the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. About this same time, I read Under a Cruel Star, Heda Kovály’s account of life in Czechoslovakia
READ MOREEarlier this year, nearly one-quarter of all Yale undergraduates enrolled in a course on how to be happy. “A lot of us are anxious, stressed, unhappy, numb,” a freshman taking the course told the New York Times. “The fact that a class like this has such large interest speaks to how tired students are of numbing
READ MORE“Somebody’s boring me,” poet Dylan Thomas once commented. “I think it’s me,” he added. Were you to become a fly on the wall, or in this age of electronic wonders, a tiny drone, you might observe my daily life and decide that I’m the most boring human on planet earth. I follow the same daily
READ MOREA friend recently sent me a popular meme called the Pyramid of Intellect. It shows the various academic degrees, starting at the base of the pyramid with a high school diploma and narrows its way up to a Ph.D. But at the very top of the pyramid is a little section that reads, “People who
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