We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.

Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.

Despite popular opinion, there are no important parallels between Madonna and Monroe, who was a virtuoso comedienne but who was in secure, depressive, passive-aggressive, and infuriatingly obstructionist in her career habits. Madonna is manic, perfectionist, workaholic. Monroe abused alcohol and drugs, while Madonna shuns them. Monroe had a tentative, melting, dreamy solipsism; Madonna has Judy Holliday's wisecracking smart mouth and Joan Crawford's steel will and bossy, circus master managerial competence.

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.