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What Kipling’s “Recessional” Can Teach Us
In 1897, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was held in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of her reign. Rudyard Kipling, who had previously turned down the post of Royal Poet Laureate (he disdained...
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An Elegy for Dr. Sherwin Nuland
Sherwin Nuland is dead. The sage of the Yale Medical School and author of 1994’s bestselling study of modern mortality, How We Die, has succumbed to prostate cancer in his Connecticut home. I read his...
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The Real Wolf of Wall Street Was One of the Most Honorable Men of the Last...
Jordan Belfort is not the real Wolf of Wall Street. The original holder of that title was Bernard Baruch, a wholly admirable investor and public servant whose life – an exercise in panache and...
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On Life with a Death Sentence: Reflections on 25 Years Since the Salman...
On February 14th, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwā against the Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie, in retaliation for Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous book The Satanic Verses....
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An Open Letter to Brandeis University
Dear Brandeis University, As one of the now thousands of voices to pipe up in this discussion, I want to express total support for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and condemn the recent attempts to minimize such a...
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Black America, Jewish America
As I mentioned in the post below, this week marked the anniversary of Hitler’s death, and I think there’s no better way to observe the occasion than to hail the outsized contributions of that race he...
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Shop Amazon, Support The Bully Pulpit!
Whether you’ve been a reader of this blog for two and a half years or just found it today, I have a request. I want you to buy yourself a book. It doesn’t matter what book. Could be my favorite one....
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The Greatest Debate of All Time: Hitchens Versus Galloway on Iraq
It’s often tricky to identify “the best” of a certain category. But with debates, ironically enough, the question is, at least to my mind, settled. There are a lot of nominees for second place:...
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J.R.R. Tolkien Tells Off the Nazis
When J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again on September 21st, 1937, it was met with critical acclaim and popular demand. Naturally, in the ensuing months, publishing houses...
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A Year’s Worth of Reading
Below are reviews of all the books I read (and some that I failed to finish) from November 2012 to December 2013. Fiction The Secret History by Donna Tartt – The work of a black magician, who,...
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