172 stories by "John Simon"
If you add up the number of practitioners of the seven cardinal (or, in lay terms, deadly) sins, I doubt if the number will equal that of those guilty of stupidity. Ergo: Shouldn't stupidity…
If you add up the number of practitioners of the seven cardinal (or, in lay terms, deadly) sins, I doubt if the number will equal that of those guilty of stupidity. Ergo: Shouldn't stupidity…
Passion is generally considered a good thing, obsession a bad one. But are they really two separate, diverse things or merely different degrees of the same phenomenon? In other words, when a…
A smart ex-girlfriend of mine always started her matutinal Times reading with the obituaries. At the time, this struck me as peculiar: what kind of spiritual necrophilia induced a vivacious,…
"Queens boy, 13, wins Scripps Spelling Bee with 'knaidel' " reads a headline in the New York Times of May 30, 2013. But a headline on June 1 announces, "Some say the spelling of a winning wo…
What is it that makes smallness lovable? That bigness should be impressive is understandable. We all respect Mount Everest as the world's highest, and Mont Blanc as Europe's highest mountain…
The recent, glowing obituaries of Roger Ebert raise the question in my mind about what makes a good critic, which Ebert hardly was. What gives the question some importance is the possible in…
Three score and ten is the life expectancy the bible allots us, and that is the age at which the film critic Roger Ebert died on April 4. He was, as the lengthy obituaries declared, the most…
Logic is a wonderful thing of which there is all too little in our world. It would, for instance, be nice if a course in logic were part of the high-school curriculum, or, failing that, a le…
What exactly does talent involve? I know what it doesn't involve. I fully subscribe to the declaration of the autobiographical hero of Anatole France's Le Lys rouge (The Scarlet Lily): "I am…
Some things are absurd. I am frequently accused of misogyny; what nonsense! For me, there is nothing more beautiful in the world, and thus more sacred, than a beautiful woman. True, this exc…
Theater is not only plays and musicals; it is also opera and ballet, and perhaps even sports events. Also canny storytelling and, if they still exist, poetry readings. And certainly masterly…
There used to be an anecdote around the American Cambridge that, whether apocryphal or not, had wide currency. One of the Radcliffe College dorms being Bertram Hall, story has it that when a…
What about the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School? Of course there should be stricter gun laws and there should be no NRA. Of course there should be greater attention pai…
The greatness of the Swiss cultural and art historian Jacob Burckhardt (1918-97) is unquestionable. Splendid are even his lesser works, like the Weltgeschichtlische Betrachtungen, whose Engl…
On October 25, 2012, at the riper than ripe age of 104, Jacques Barzun died in San Antonio, where he and his wife had been living for the last 16 years. On the following November 5, at the a…
As I have often said and sometimes written, the history of art extends from Anonymous to Untitled, from when only the work mattered to where only the name in the signature does.What reminds …
It is an age-old question haunting some of us: What exactly is wit and what humor? Though hard to define individually, the difference between them is worth consideration and identifiable. Be…
Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the few great poets who were also charming, has a delightful book of essays, Le Flaneur des deux rives (The Stroller Through Paris), about his walks through th…
Reading the other day the simultaneous obituaries of Phyllis Diller and Tony Scott has been revelatory. They turned out to be complementary articles serving as bookends for the taste of Amer…
Most things are either good or bad, but dreams, with fearful symmetry, manage to be both good and bad. Just about everyone has had good and bad ones, and since about a third of our days are …
Of all Anglophone writers only Shakespeare has been more written about than James Joyce, and Shakespeare has three-and-a-half centuries on him. Of all modern writers, not only in English, Jo…
Memory is so much a part of us that it might as well be an organ, like the lungs or the heart. It is as much relied upon as they, equally unconsciously and, when needed, spontaneously. And w…
There is a similarity between politics and tennis, which I note, even though I am passionately interested in tennis and only slightly in politics. This is too bad, as my wife reminded me the…
We are having a bit of a Noel Coward revival. There are readings of some of his plays, a course or seminar at Marymount Manhattan College, a marvelous exhibition at Lincoln Center's Performi…
