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
A 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 […]
Read MoreMr. Ray Nilsson died in an upstairs bedroom in my house early Monday morning around 2:35 a.m., which was nothing he or I contemplated back when I married his daughter, but life takes us down some mighty interesting roads. If he’d had his choice, he probably would’ve died in the woods around his log cabin […]
Read MoreI often walk through Times Square where the Incompetent Bomber parked his 1993 Nissan Pathfinder last Saturday with the alarm clocks wired to the M88 firecrackers in the canister between the five-gallon gasoline containers and the three propane tanks, the bags of nonexplosive fertilizer, and so I take a personal interest in the case. I’m […]
Read MoreIt’s the best spring ever, green and lush, and baby robins are chittering in their nest in the maple tree and the smell of blossoms is in the air — and yet we dour Scots cannot forget that April 27 was the anniversary of our ignominious defeat at the Battle of Dunbar, our good King […]
Read MoreI travel around a LOT — too much, but one does learn things from spending time in the company of strangers, such as the fact that too many young American men suffer from a desperate lack of social skills. I’m not talking about dancing the tango and ordering wine and engaging in witty repartee, just […]
Read MoreSaid it before, say it again: It’s a great country, and one of its beauties is freedom of expression, freer now than ever before, and another is a general amiability that you find everywhere, the helpfulness of strangers, the pleasure of small talk. Of course it’s spring and the air is brisk and this makes […]
Read MoreI think of myself as conservative and that’s why it was so irritating last Sunday in church when we were instructed to cry out gladly on cue, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia,” and so I did not. An invasion of privacy, and when the trumpets blared, trying to goose us into jubilation, I wished we […]
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