Reading Henry James

A couple of hundred pages into reading The Portrait of a Lady for the first time in at least twenty years, I worried that I was going to end up furious at Henry James, who wrote it. I really didn’t want to be mad at Henry James. That was not only because it...

The “Disposition Matrix”

The worst part of the presidential campaign is its stifling, two-party narrowness on certain issues. The foreign policy debate of recent days showed just how similarly the two would approach foreign policy (well, apparently, if they are to be believed). There are...