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On Eliot Weinberger

At the top, a good family helps, clothes help, manners help, the right friends help, but nothing helps like money.

The university at one hundred; how good is it, really?

After the taking of Helen, the Trojans became Athens’s enemy and the Greek media and writers like Homer used “subtle lies” to make Troy seem not truly Greek.

Bitte, Ich Spreche Nur Amerikanisch I’d like to bracket these observations between two half-remembered New Yorker cartoons. The first shows three people, a woman and two men, each tops in their fields, being interviewed by a man who has asked them to identify three people who’ve influenced them. The woman, a writer, mentions Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and Chekhov; the golfer names Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods, and, to everyone’s surprise, Chekhov; finally the physicist rattles off his list: Einstein, Newton, and . . . yes, you guessed it, Chekhov. The importance of translation, anyone...