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
The best part of Christmas is just before it starts, when all the preparations are done or it’s too late to worry about them, and after you run a vacuum around the living room you can sit down and close your eyes and let old Christmases come winging back from the Olden Days of Yore, […]
Read MoreOne more reason to believe in God is the hope for the ultimate judgment when someday Someone will pronounce the final truth and we’ll be done with all these small mean anecdotes that pass for history. Meanwhile, they constitute most of what we know about politics, stories told by men with a grudge. This is […]
Read MoreCall me Hrothgar the Savage, but when I look at men’s fashions in magazines, the models all sullen and sensitive and obviously spending much too much time on their hair, wearing sweaters made from Persian cat fur woven with feathers of snowy owls, yours for $1,495, I feel a strong urge to put on a […]
Read MoreI got to put on a tux and go to the National Book Awards in New York a couple weeks ago and eat lamb chops in a hotel ballroom and breathe air recently exhaled by Toni Morrison and Norman Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other greats and near-greats of the trade. I was there as […]
Read MoreFamily, friends, good health (knock on wood), lots to be thankful for, including this $1.59 rollerball pen and its flowing cursive line that makes me feel as elegant as Michel de Montaigne. Gratitude makes sense for an American. We occupy a bountiful country of great civility (yes, really) and robustness and freedom, and if not […]
Read MoreThe pleasure of fine dining has pretty much worn off for me, I must admit. I realized this the other day when I sat in a French-type restaurant and gazed at the menu and felt a craving for a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of chili. Not a gourmet chili made from beans imported […]
Read MoreIt could be worse. The Pharaoh keeps piling mud on your desk to be made into bricks, and you work late, and you head onto the freeway, which is packed with Huns and Visigoths, and your mere presence infuriates them. They shriek at you and make vile gestures. Meanwhile, you’re listening to the teeth-grinders on […]
Read MoreA person can learn a great deal if you’re lucky enough to get into serious trouble and of course it’s more beneficial if you do it when you’re young. But trouble is a good teacher at any time and it’s a shame so many people try to skip the School of Hard Knocks. If only […]
Read MorePeople stood out on my front porch the other night talking about politics and inhaling the sweetness of fall, intimations of nobility in the air and also decaying vegetable matter. What we felt was the elation of a warm night in late October in the northern latitudes, when you can stand outdoors in your shirtsleeves […]
Read MoreIf your alderman introduced a resolution in the city council called the Salute To Our Boys In Uniform Resolution, which proclaimed that we support the troops in their mission to light a beacon of freedom in a dark world, etc., and in small print in Section II, Division A, Paragraph 4, Line 122 was a […]
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