Life Archives

Tuesday

July 15, 2025

The Erie Canal at 200

I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal She’s a good old worker and a good old pal Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal I’ve a pal named Sal – he’s no mule, alas – but it’s only a 15-mile trip for me, too, up Route 98 to the Erie Canal, which turns 200 years old this October 26. I while away the occasional summer morn sitting by its banks, editing or writing or reading, coffee washing the donuts down my maw. I love the old canal town of Albion (where perfidy has no place!), its tumbledown Main Street blessed by the silver-domed Orleans County Courthouse. The Upstate New York folklorist Carl Carmer grew up here, as did the sleeping car magnate George Pullman.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The problem with Greta Thunberg

Like Agatha Christie’s “rescuer from the sea," Greta Thunberg swept upon Gaza to save the starving, the homeless, the bombed – and the bombing – from destruction at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, only to be intercepted by one of the IDF’s boats and offered a bottle of water and a sandwich wrapped in plastic (which looked not at all like an item from a Jewish delicatessen). La Thunberg later characterized the incident as a kidnapping. Following that, she was presumably (as promised by the Israeli Defense Minister) compelled to view footage of the events of October 7, 2023, before being loaded on to a CO2-dispersing passenger jet and flown to France, en route to her native Sweden. She explained that to remain longer in Israel would have been to discredit her cause.

Tuesday

June 3, 2025

Peter Watson

Palm Beach is stuck in a gridlock

Palm Beach is never happier than when it’s making news – the more unexpected the better. The latest opportunity to pat itself on the back came in the wake of Palm Beach resident Donald J. Trump’s “silly” wheeze (according to the local paper) to make Canada the 51st state. Whereas overall, as a result of President Trump’s speculations, visits to America by Canadians dropped by 2 percent in February – with a whopping 70 percent decline in bookings in March – reservations on flights from north of the 49th parallel to Palm Beach International Airport actually rose by 15 percent. The place remains popular, even for Canadians.

Bill McMorris

The origin of Father’s Day

On his first day in office, President Trump signed executive orders to end DEI. Schoolchildren nationwide know that he has failed to deliver, for every June they must participate in the celebration of a federal holiday that only entered the national consciousness thanks to endorsements from ACLU radicals and Big Business eager to make a buck. Ever since Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck in 2020, the children’s art instructor has forced them to write paeans to a petulant overweight drunk. I’m speaking, of course, of Father’s Day. Father’s Day began in Washington State as a church service orchestrated by Sonora Smart Dodd, an adoring daughter who wanted to honor Dad for not falling to pieces when Mom died.

Bill Kauffman

Remembering Jackson C. Frank

Before venturing to the North Park Theatre in Buffalo to catch a one-night-only showing of Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C. Frank, the new documentary about the Queen City’s doomed native-son folksinger, I shared Frank’s most famous number, “Blues Run the Game,” with our friend Pat. “That could be the saddest song I’ve ever heard,” she said. Yet Frank wrote it during his very brief wine, women and musical heyday. One shudders to imagine what he composed as an obese, one-eyed, homeless paranoid-schizophrenic. Frank’s western New York contemporary, the novelist John Gardner, said that “art begins in a wound, an imperfection, and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Is everything political?

I first heard the slogan “Everything is political” from a left-wing reporter for Wyoming’s statewide newspaper in the mid-1980s, at least a decade before I became acquainted with the work of the revolutionary Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, deviser of the strategy known as the “long march through the institutions” of the West. While the right clearly has no choice but to fight fire with fire in the struggle against its ideological and political adversaries, the fact remains that the left has substantially won the battle by having helped to transform a slogan into present reality. The idea of everything as politics, and politics as everything, is ideology in its purest form.

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

Peter Watson

The rise of millionaires, valet parking and facelifts in Palm Beach

The two favored topics of conversation in Palm Beach are money and the place itself, so the latest survey by Henley & Partners, a specialist service which advises wealthy clients where to live, is doubly welcome. It shows that Palm Beach County is among the top five fastest-growing “wealth hubs” in the world, outpacing even Dubai and Silicon Valley. This latest report shows that Palm Beach County cities (that is, Palm Beach, the island off the mainland, and West Palm Beach, on the mainland, separated only by three drawbridges) experienced a 112 percent increase in millionaire residents between 2014 and 2024.

Bill Kauffman

How Major League Baseball lost its soul

I highly recommend Homestand, Will Bardenwerper’s new book contrasting the community-enhancing qualities of grass-roots baseball with the soulless corporate product that Major League Baseball has become – and it’s not just because I am a central character therein. The book is at once a beautiful portrait of bleacher-level society and a scathingly effective indictment of the automatons who are destroying the American game. Will spent the summer of 2022 in and around Dwyer Stadium, home of the Batavia Muckdogs, an independent team of college ballplayers. This amateur ball club was the feisty successor to professional teams that had graced our fair city since 1939.

Catriona Olding

The sad decline of painting

What hope is there for artists following the sale last year of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled “A.I. God,” for $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of the canvas Ai-Da couldn’t reach. Innovation wins. In the 1970s, the walls of art-school degree shows were studded with plaster casts of students’ genitals. By the 1980s, students were discouraged from attempting realist painting, but messy gray abstract works were still acceptable. Then it was found objects and piles of stuff. One young studio assistant I knew in the 2000s had a tutor at art school who’d gained top marks in his degree by filming himself pouring a glass of milk over his head.

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

Peter Watson

How Palm Beach became Wall Street South

Palm Beach, Florida Palm Beach is now, officially, “Wall Street South.” So says the local Business Development Board, which adds that no fewer than 250 financial firms have relocated here in the years since the pandemic. Among the companies included are BlackRock, Citadel, Siris Capital, Goldman Sachs and Elliott Investment Management. Also, a number of medical device manufacturing firms have been attracted – these include Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy Synthes, Precision Esthetics and Modernizing Medicine, along with a strong aerospace sector – Pratt & Whitney, Lockheed Martin, Sikorsky Helicopters, Northrop Grumman.

Bill McMorris

The importance of the Band-Aid

Alexandria, Virginia Back in February, the first grader sustained a scrape that left a tiny red dot on her leg. She requested a soft cast and a medevac chopper. She settled for a dollar-store bandage. She shouldn’t have: it turns out she was quietly bleeding to death from the inside. She would have continued to deteriorate had we not been alarmed by a toilet clog the week after she fell. The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by one Earle Dickson, a New Jersey cotton buyer with a clumsy wife. All her cooking mishaps inspired her exhausted husband to combine his stock with the methacrylates of surgical tape and some crinoline fabric found in petticoats. The J&J website can’t help but note that Mr.

Bill Kauffman

The dog that haunts Russ Benzin

Batavia, New York Fifty-five years after his Vietnam-era military service ended, Russ Benzin remains haunted. Not, thank God, by memories of the state-sanctioned mass murder that is war, but by a seemingly intractable and feral military dog he came to love. I met Russ years ago in the third-base bleachers at Dwyer Stadium, where we whiled away many summers watching a set of trained canines – the Batavia Muckdogs of the (now defunct or, rather, exterminated) New York-Penn League. In the manner of ballpark friendships, ours developed over the years: from nodding acquaintance to grumbling exchanges (“why the hell didn’t the third-base coach send that guy?”) to friendship.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why are Europeans so untroubled by their ignorance of America?

Laramie, Wyoming Americans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964. Much less widely recognized is how little Europeans know about America, Americans and their own civilization – an ignorance that troubles them not at all, perhaps because they seem to be unaware of the fact.

Thursday

March 13, 2025

Peter Watson

Trump’s security, dress codes and airport romance in Palm Beach

With President Trump spending so much time away from Washington at his home and club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, there are good spin-offs and not-so-good spin-offs for Palm Beachers. One of the good ones is for the local hotels: his security guard is of such a size that they are being billeted all over town. Less good is the sheer cost of security. The city council has this month had to transfer $20 million to the sheriff’s department for the costs incurred so far, and anticipates a further $25 million expenditure in the course of the year. It expects to be reimbursed by the federal government, as it was during Trump’s first term as president, but it won’t be paid before the next financial year.

Bill Kauffman

Asteroid 2024 YR4 and the geekoisie

"Giant Asteroid" has been a popular also-ran in the last three presidential elections, at least judging from bumper stickers, and those wiseacres who preferred planetary annihilation to Hillary, Biden, Kamala and Trump may finally get their wish in 2032, when the newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 has — according to current calculations, liable to change — about a 3 percent chance of hitting Earth. The geekoisie has been all a-twitter over this forecast, as visions of tsunamis and extinction-level events and the hot astrophysicists who adorn disaster movies dance in their heads.

Cosmo Landesman

Why I won’t date younger women

I recently got some good news I’d like to share: I’m thirty-six years old. Yes, I know I’m chronologically seventy — but a blood and urine test I had reveals that I’m biologically thirty-six. (Your chronological age is the number of years you’ve lived; your biological age is how old your cells are.) Dr. Alka Patel, a brilliant British longevity expert tells me that she has never seen such a big gap between chronological and biological age as mine. So, what does this mean? It means I will probably live to a ripe old age, free of any related diseases. But to me it means that while, on the outside, I might look like an old white guy with a wobbly chin, sad eyes and the scar tissue of one too many failed romances — inside, I’m a vigorous and virile thirty-six-year-old man.

Ryan Spaeder

Baseball may be trapped in a two-party system

Hope springs eternal. With Opening Day 2025 under our belts, however, you cannot shake the feeling that America’s pastime, like its politics, is a two-party system. The Los Angeles Dodgers enter the season as the incumbent World Series champions, having triumphed over the New York Yankees last October. Who expects this year to be much different? Here is a quick rundown of the Dodgers offseason coup: two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell and international phenomenon Roki Sasaki bolster an already stellar rotation featuring Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tony Gonsolin. And just in case that’s not enough, their best offseason pitching acquisition is reigning MVP Shohei Ohtani, fresh from becoming the first player in history to slug fifty home runs and steal fifty bases.

Monday

February 17, 2025

Cosmo Landesman

Toby Young: love him or loathe him?

London Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes. Mine is called Toby Young. For around thirty years people have asked me: are you still friends with that awful Toby Young? And with a bit of hesitation I say, well... yes. And they shake their heads or roll their eyes in disbelief and disapproval. They don’t like his politics — he’s a right-wing conservative and founder of the Free Speech Union, which defends victims of woke ideology. And they don’t like Toby the person because of a series of sophomoric and “sexist” tweets that came to public light in 2018. It was national news and it cost Toby his career in public life.

Bill Kauffman

The controversy of Daylight Savings Time

Batavia, New York I bear no ill will against golfers — I triple-bogey easy holes and miss gimme putts with the worst of them — but President Trump’s demand that we eliminate Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a double eagle out of the blue, especially as Trump had earlier advocated a move to year-round DST. Although Benjamin Franklin is often credited as its progenitor, the real father of Daylight Saving Time, according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward, was the golfing British architect William Willett, who deplored “the waste of daylight.” The British Royal Astronomer dismissed Willett’s idea with the counterproposal that “between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why human history is fated to end in apocalypse

Laramie, Wyoming In 1988 Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of history had been reached in the form of liberal democratic capitalism, the ne plus ultra of human civilization. Three decades later it seems more likely that the direction of history will be theological, as the world comes reluctantly to recognize that science, democracy, capitalism and technology are insufficient to the achievement of human happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment.