Herewith some additional horrifying background material on how the Lone Star State tells the country’s supreme legal authority to kiss its Lone Star ass and insouciantly continues its self-legalized killings, including some prisoners awaiting appeal proceedings that could reverse their previous sentences. From The New York Times on June 14th: “Texas juries in capital cases [...]
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Let no one still mired out of date in world history of half a century or so ago come at me with “Hmphhh . . . they should talk!” I hope the word has finally got around that the Germany I’ve adopted as my own country today glories in one of the most vital [...]
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When I went over into eastern Berlin Sunday night to cover a premiere at the grand old State Opera on Berlin’s showpiece boulevard named Unter den Linden (because of the quadruple columns of trees marching down the center separator green strip, I had to take the subterranean U-Bahn because yesterday I got a call from [...]
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Seymour Hersh, for years now the world’s champion investigative reporter who’s wound up in recent years at The New Yorker, has given a scorching interview to our first-rate newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Hersh became famous almost ovemight when he single-handedly broke the story of the My Lai atrocity – the cold-blooded massacre of Vietnamese civilians by [...]
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So nice to discover (in the latest issue of The Nation) this all-out tribute to my own greatest stateside television enthusiasm since I fled the country twelve years ago. I know him only thanks to occasional snippets that come my way via the Internet, but they’ve sufficed to make me an all-out fan; I share [...]
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I can’t recall when I’ve read a recent news story quite so horrifying and disgusting as this one I found waiting from me when I came home from dinner this evening. Its headline says it all: “No Justice for El-Masri” – and that summation applies to a country constantly harping so piously on “freedom and [...]
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[Several fans of Richter - does my personal involvement distort my own impression that the music world, especially music-lovers, have meanwhile come around to regarding him as the preëminent pianist of his time? - have for years urged me to make generally available again the story of his reunion with his mother the summer of [...]
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Friends of mine have had a tough time with my recent naturalization as a full-fledged (albeit Texas-born) citizen of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland – the Federal Republic of Germany, the emphatically democratic successor of the Nazis’ ineffably hideous self-proclaimed “Thousand-Year Reich” – which in fact ceased to exist after only twelve, wiped out of existence by [...]
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Mention the little un-iced pastry known in France as une madeleine and anyone familiar with literature thinks immediately of Marcel Proust, whom the sight and taste of a madeleine dipped in tea launched on a protracted stroll down his own Memory Lane that gave the world the great multi-volume autobiographical novel for which he borrowed [...]
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During my years as a gung-ho Parisian Left-Banker (1949-51) – complete with full beard, beret basque, British Army surplus duffel-coat, and a grungy little walk-up hotel room that cost me $1 a night at those days’ black-market rate (and where, the New York girl who’d preceded me to Paris and got me installed there assured [...]
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