Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
October is a month for intellectual clarity. Try to keep that in mind. Cold is a stimulant, heat a depressant. The chilly month of October is when the Reformation began. Our guys in Germany were walking around enjoying the fall colors and the beer and the madchens and they thought, “Hey, why am I paying […]
Read MoreMy sandy-haired gap-toothed daughter likes to snap my picture on a cellphone as I’m eating my bran flakes in the morning and brooding over the front page of the Times, over which there is now more to brood than ever. She is 8 and she looks stunning in pictures, and I look stunned, as if […]
Read MoreI wish the pope had talked to me before he gave his “evil and inhuman” speech that got Muslims so testy at him. I could have told him, “Don’t quote some old emperor’s thoughts about Muslims unless you’re willing to have people confuse his views with yours.” You don’t tell a Mormon, “My neighbor used […]
Read MoreAnd now you can’t bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It’s the latest new rule laid down by the nation’s security wizards. Everyone knows it’s ridiculous – the notion that you can toss together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from late-night movies. You might as well prohibit […]
Read MoreGrowing up in the fifties, we imagined our country defended by guided missiles poised in bunkers, jet fighters on the tarmac and pilots in the ready room prepared to scramble, a colonel with a black briefcase sitting in the hall outside the president’s bedroom, but September 11th gave us a clearer picture. We have a […]
Read MoreIt’s the best part of summer, the long lovely passage into fall. A procession of lazy golden days which my sandy-haired gap-toothed little girl has been painting, small abstract masterpieces in tempera and crayon and glitter, reminiscent of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning (his early glitter period). She put a sign out front, “Art […]
Read MoreIt was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, “I’m going to die, aren’t I? I’m going to die.” Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke […]
Read MoreYou wake up on a summer morning, the smell of possibility in the air, and you feel slim and gifted and innocent, and of course you should mow the lawn, but as Walt Whitman said, “What is the grass? It is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift.” And who would cut God’s hanky? […]
Read MoreTwenty-four people packed into the dining room for my 64th birthday dinner and made a steady dull roar from the salad course right on through the cake and coffee, and I hardly got a word in edgewise. People kept inquiring if I was having fun, which is irritating. The answer is no. I don’t want […]
Read MoreIt is stifling hot in Minnesota, more like Savannah than St. Paul, and if the heat wave goes on much longer, I am bound to start writing a play in which folks sit around in their underwear beneath a ceiling fan and drink sloe gin and curse the degeneracy of their ancestors that cost them […]
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