by James Como Penguin Books: New York, 2020.  286 pp., with Bibliographic Essay and Index.   Writing on Shakespeare James Shapiro is authoritative, even compelling; his 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is all the proof anyone needs.  The interested layman will find it not only ...Read More...

by James Como Seventy years ago, on October 16th, 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in the U.K.  It was a fresh, strong wind that billowed the sails of children’s literature.  It blew from Narnia and has not stopped since.  Six more books would follow in each of the next ...Read More...

Fourteen Points on the Election by James Como Why they hate Trump:  1/ He beat the Chosen One, though he was outspent, along the way making the opposition (especially the militant punditry) look very stupid: his heresy is that he scorns their opinions. 2/ He is reversing Obama’s – and ...Read More...

by James Como * Why are healthy symbols, some happily traditional others hallowed, yielded so easily to the fanatics?  The okay symbol (thumb and forefinger making an O, the other three fingers raised) and the Betsy Ross flag are now verboten.  Why?  Because some lunatics have adopted them?  ...Read More...

by James Como      Everyone must be engaged in our struggle.       Given our station and norms the struggle naturally includes dinner parties: first, we are exquisitely skilled at giving them, and, second, we can contrive the arena.  (Say all you like about the ills of confirmation bias, ...Read More...

by James Como Decades ago, when Ed Koch was beating Mario Cuomo in Dem polls for the party nomination as the candidate for governor of New York, whispers about Koch’s sexual preference appeared. Wounded, Koch began to be seen about town with Bess Myerson, a former Miss America who had become ...Read More...

On the place and purpose of conversation in literary history. by James Como Samuel Johnson To begin, this quiz: who is the speaker of the long quotation below? Hint: it is one of the most famous fictional characters in the history of English letters. Another hint: early in the narrative, ...Read More...

by James Como Not long ago, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Sulzberger attacked Donald Trump for his use of the word ‘treason’ as directed against some elements of the press. A powerful, deadly accusation for Sulzberger, who, sanctimoniously, adduced the Constitution. The ...Read More...

by James Como  Our current civil war seems cultural, and therefore political, and threfore necessarily lapel-grabbing personal. Rarely does anyone on the Left attempt reasonable argument, or any persuasion; all is hortatory, imperative, urgent, condemnatory, dismissive. I used to think ‘progressives’ ...Read More...

by James Como Chaos seems to be the concept du jour and our president its avatar. Of course, anti-Trumpsters think it all – his election, his utterances, his decisions – accidental: there is no “policy” behind what he does, no thought-out strategy, merely ganglia beyond the control of intellect ...Read More...

by James Como Vladimiro Montesinos In August 2016, I wrote here of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK), who had been sworn in as Peru’s president a month earlier. I remarked that he looked especially tall because he is surrounded by pygmies. So far that observation has been vindicated. The Congress, ...Read More...

by James Como These days if I were to “take a knee” the crackling would wake the neighbors and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t make it back up, at least not for a while. I would be paying a price, as is the case, for example, when I (try to) genuflect at Mass, first leaning, then hoisting, on ...Read More...

by James Como Consider a (truncated) mind experiment directed towards the restoration of civil discourse, restoration, that is, of an age when, say, Bob Hope could joke about Dems and Johnny Carson about President Reagan without malice or as an attempt to destroy. It requires a paradigm shift, ...Read More...

by James Como Moral exhibitionism, self-righteous venting, potty talk, hitting and smashing – behaviors that when undertaken by children are called ‘acting out’ – these are all terrifically satisfying to, but also terribly distracting for, post-adolescent actors. Just so has #The Resistance been ...Read More...

by James Como We arrived on Thursday morning, my wife and I, one full day after the troubling national elections: Would Geert Wilders’ (“I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam”) PPV party prevail? More generally, would the ‘Far Right’ – what in the Netherlands is called by the Far Left the ‘alt-Right’ ...Read More...