Brendan Bernhard

Oriana Fallaci Photo by Francesco Scavullo

The Fallaci Code

Brendan Bernhard
In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades? How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion......

The Butterfly Effect

Brendan Bernhard
THERE’S A POPULAR SCIENTIFIC THEORY known as “the butterfly effect,” in which a small insect beating its wings in one corner of the world can start a chain reaction that leads to a hurricane in another. Like bird flu, the butterfly effect appears to have transmuted and taken up residence......
Already looking skeptical: The author at 11 or 12 in Kensington Gardens

''Seems never to achieve his potential. Indolent.''

Brendan Bernhard
There can be few things more likely to induce a state of profound melancholy than looking through one’s old school report cards. That sentence doesn’t quite satisfy, but I’m going to let it stand. The reason it doesn’t satisfy is that it all depends on what’s in the report cards,......
Photo by Thierry Dudoit

De Tocqueville, Part Deux

Brendan Bernhard
Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of the new book American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, is dissatisfied with the state of sex in America. According to the suave, 56-year-old French philosopher with the big hair and gently fading matinee-idol looks, puritanism is rampant in this country. Paradoxically — and......
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The Adventure of Arthur Conan Doyle

Brendan Bernhard
In Arthur & George, Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Love, etc.) takes us to the twilight of the Victorian era to resuscitate a real-life story about the brief but legally significant intersection between the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and......

Stealing Glances

Brendan Bernhard
“People here pretend to care about art, but they don’t really give a damn,” an old L.A. hand told me over a lunch of Yemenite chicken soup at a small restaurant on Fairfax. His evidence? In New York, the “Cézanne and Pissarro” exhibition was shown at the redesigned MoMA before......
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Tough Guys, Effete Snobs and Mad Women

Brendan Bernhard
In the late 1960s, American publisher Kent Carroll was visiting French West Africa when he noticed something strange going on. A lot of young men were affecting a kind of ambling, big-guy gait that seemed oddly... American. Eventually, he discovered why: A John Wayne movie festival was playing, and many......

The French Insurrection

Brendan Bernhard
“France’s Failure,” declares the cover story of this week’s Economist over the photograph of a firefighter vainly trying to douse a torched SUV somewhere in, well, France. Exactly which part of France is anyone’s guess, since in the past fortnight more than 6,000 cars, as well as numerous buses, supermarkets,......

Ghost Time

Brendan Bernhard
On the refrigerator door of my small New York apartment are three photographs of my large — okay, huge — L.A. apartment. I keep them there, I suppose, to torture myself. My L.A. pad, which runs the length of a “luxury living” WWI-era apartment building, is so long, and so......
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Serious Stuff

Brendan Bernhard
Illustration by Miguel ValenzuelaSalman Rushdie doesn’t write novels, he writes epics. If he were a cook, he’d be like the chefs in Shalimar the Clown, his new opus about love, terrorism, and the disputed land of Kashmir, where (during peaceful times) diners were treated to gustatory marathons such as “the......