Roger Kaplan
Surprises and upsets are the normal fare at sporting events, but do they determine outcomes? Usually not: this year’s French Open, which concluded yesterday, pitted the no.’s 1 and 2 seeds against each other in both the women’s and men’s…
New Jersey’s own Tommy Paul and Maryland’s own Frances Tiafoe made it into the second week, and thus the quarter-finals, of the French Open. This is good news for American tennis, considering no American man since Andre Agassi in 1999…
As we file, Jannik Sinner, the leading Italian tennis player and world No. 1, is playing point for point against the Spanish star Carlos Alcaraz. If the latter is heir to the immortal Rafael Nadal, the former carries the athletic…
Crazy days! In the spirit of positive thinking the last century’s New Dealers used to say, Happy days are here again! These are nervous days — boom or bust! But I say, with Iris De Ment, “let the mystery be,”…
Not to get faux-erudite; Tocqueville was required reading when I was in school, and a blessed requirement that was. I returned to the famous concluding peroration after reading about the negotiations the president views as the necessary end to the…
Madison Key’s three-set win in the ladies’ final at the Australian Open over defending champion Aryna Sabalenka is a textbook case of couldn’t happen to a more deserving lass. The one-time golden teen of American tennis, expected to be the…
Not a great many English-speaking Americans — there still are some — have heard of Boualem Sansal, fewer have read his remarkable novels; so maybe the simplest way to introduce him is to say he is Algeria’s Alexander Solzhenitsyn, notwithstanding…
As far as I can tell from the news, though obviously it’s much too early to know how it will play out, the Trump foreign policy is resolutely Reaganesque in the sense that he is going for sovereignty, secure borders,…
There was a moment of civility following the election, with both the president and the vice president calling the president-elect to congratulate him on his winning campaign and assure him of their full cooperation in the transition. He reportedly accepted…
