Nick Burns

Friday

March 1, 2019

Why is the Bulwark bullying Victor Davis Hanson?

Why does everyone have it in for Victor Davis Hanson? Professor, Hoover Institution fellow and farmer, Hanson is a consummate scholar of military history and ancient Greece. His literary accomplishments include paeans to American agrarianism and epoch-spanning histories of war, lauded by left and right. Yet the bipartisan goodwill has lately evaporated. The reason for the contempt is easily apprehensible: Hanson’s new book is titled, simply, The Case for Trump.The repercussions have been swift. Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker accused Hanson of ‘hostility to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants.

Monday

November 19, 2018

Nick Burns

The real Elena Ferrante is a male-female collaboration, but HBO’s My Brilliant Friend is a man’s world

On the one occasion when I visited Naples, the plane from Barcelona was packed with shouting Italians. They broke into exuberant cheers when we completed a routine landing, and clambered over the seats to pinch my cheek. My taxi driver got lost and it took hours to find my Airbnb, in an outlying block of flats with great chunks loose and crumbling from its garish orange façade. The airline, it goes without saying, had lost my bag, and the husband and wife who rented out the room wasted no time in selling me a toothbrush. I spoke no Italian save a few words of Dante, and they no English, but when my Italian-speaking friend arrived the next day he found he could understand them no better than I could. To blame, the notorious Neapolitan dialect.