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
I write every day except when I’m sick or my wife insists that we are on vacation. I like to write early in the morning, and if I wake up at 5am or even 4am, it is with a sense of gratitude for the extra hours of pure quiet. I make a pot of coffee, boot up my laptop, sit anywhere in the house that seems promising and launch forth.
Read MoreI saw the famous Eisenstadt picture of the V-J Day kiss in Life when I was a boy and thought it was sweet: the girl in the white dress standing, bent back in the arms of the sailor who is planting a hard kiss on her lips, with Times Square and grinning onlookers in the background.
Read MoreThe wonders of the modern age continue to amaze — nonfat half & half for your coffee, cream without consequences (what’s next? safe sex?) — but the true miracle still is spring, which came late to us in Minnesota, in the frozen north, tucked in under Canada.
Read MoreA perfect shiny summer day and a crowd of jittery children in clusters on the corner, about to board a yellow bus, their backpacks in a pile, their mothers giving urgent last-minute reassurances, and I stop and stare at this Large Life Event. Kids from nice homes being abandoned by their mothers in broad daylight […]
Read MoreMy time is short and so is yours, so why not tell the truth: A person can get along very well in life without one bit of the mathematics and physics they rammed into our brains in high school. Fifty years later, and there hasn’t been a single moment when I’ve thought, “Oh if only […]
Read MoreA drizzly Flag Day and wet flags hang on their little poles stuck in the grass along our street. The child asks, “Why the flags?” So you talk about the meaning of the flag, that we Americans are one people, despite our contrariness, and you go on too long about this in the coffee-grinder voice […]
Read MoreA fine rainy day in Minnesota, and of course we should be discussing regulation of banking and the credit-default-swap market, but something in me wants to walk under a big black umbrella to the cafe for a skinny latte and eavesdrop on the college crowd, who, despite the lousy job market, seem as ebullient as […]
Read MoreI flew home from Washington Monday night, looking at live pictures on the BP website taken by an underwater robot of the greasy waters of the Gulf, and how’s that for a Metaphor of Our Times? Aboard a Delta Airbus at 37,000 feet maneuvering around giant thunderheads, connected to the Internet via satellite, looking at […]
Read MoreI ran into my daughter’s favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, in New York the other night, whose Magic Tree House books I’ve read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of Obama. Bang bang bang, one […]
Read MoreI was the only reporter who snuck into the Senate Spouses dinner in Washington last week and nobody swore me to secrecy so here goes … Tuesday, May 11, in the lofty, leafy glass arcade of the U.S. Botanic Garden near the Capitol, tea partier Scott Brown hobnobbed with prairie progressive Tom Harkin, affable Chuck […]
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