Would You Take This Betts? Sportsball fans who already miss NFL action have just weeks to wait until baseball throws out the first pitch on March 26. While the Astros cheating scandal dominates baseball news, teams across the league are furiously shuffling rosters in hopes of coming up with the winning lineup. 100 years ago,… Read More

The French newspaper Le Monde called it “the robbery of the century.” So what was it? A Mission Impossible-style crew of balaclava-wearing acrobats bypassing sophisticated alarms to burgle a museum or gallery? Or maybe it looked like one of those “Oceans” movies: a crack team of hardened specialists tunneling deep underneath a casino or bank vault to blow… Read More

It’s 2020, and yet in today’s Disneyfied America, little girls still dream of becoming princesses. Really, what’s not to like about it? You get all the pomp and circumstance of the royal court without the inconvenient stress of actually running the country. You get to show off the crown jewels. You even get to lead… Read More

Most people who were born on January 17, 1922, have long since passed away. Of those who are still alive, few are still working in any capacity. And only one of them is still going strong after 80 years in show business. Her name is Betty White. And last week, the actress, animal rights activist,… Read More

Everyone understands the concept of a “tax haven” — a delightfully sunny island somewhere in the subtropics, or a cozy European duchy tucked away on a scenic Alpine lake. Perhaps the global rich who take advantage of these safe deposit boxes just want someplace nice to stay when they visit their money. Surely that’s why… Read More

Moviegoers the past few years could be forgiven for thinking comic books had taken over Hollywood. So much of the “sophisticated adult drama” that grownups used to see in theaters has migrated to streaming video, that it seems suburban multiplexes are reserved for Batman, Superman, and their cape-wearing cronies. (Or are you more of a… Read More

Holiday season is drawing to a close, and we hope your celebration was exactly what you hoped for, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Toyotathon. But now it’s time to begin anew, with a new year and a new decade. That means resolutions: time to finally start that diet, give up those cancer sticks,… Read More

Subject Line: The Twelve Days of Taxmas Every year, PNC Bank publishes their “Christmas Price Index” to track the cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas. For 2019, it’s a hefty $38,994. (And you thought your holiday spending was out of control!) The index may not be completely accurate — for example, the ten lords-a-leaping are valued using the cost of… Read More

Would you believe that Spotify offers over a million Christmas songs? There’s something for every taste. The best of them, like Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti’s magnificent “O Holy Night,” are sublime evocations that lift the human spirit. Some, like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” are banal background noise for department store Santas.… Read More

Between 1983 and 1985, mobster Whitey Bulger whacked three people and buried them under the dirt-floor basement of a house in Boston’s working-class “Southie” neighborhood. Bulger, an FBI informant who inspired Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, vanished after his handler tipped him off that he was looking down the business end of an indictment.… Read More