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
It is a large moment for Democrats, learning to stick with a good man through a rough period when the people who crave disillusionment have become disillusioned. It’s like a winter vacation in the Caribbean when it rains buckets and you eat some bad shellfish and a shrieky teenager says you’ve ruined her life forever. […]
Read MoreThere they all were on the Sunday-morning chatfests, droning on about the anger of the American people as shown by the election in Massachusetts of a pickup truck to the U.S. Senate — ever ready, as pundits are, to take one good story and extrude it into a national trend portentous with meaning. One could […]
Read MoreThe tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don’t have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms — we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what’s going […]
Read MoreI went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we […]
Read MoreThe cruise ships sail from Tampa and Fort Lauderdale and Miami, great ocean-going pueblos, 10 decks high, passengers lounging on their verandas, gazing at the sea, workhorse Americans trying to get out of cell-phone range for a week and sweeten up to their families. It is a beautiful thing to behold. You walk around the […]
Read MoreIt is possible in this day and age to fly south in December and three hours later land in a city where you can sit comfortably in your T-shirt and linen jacket and eat your dinner at a café under palm trees and still enjoy the protections of the U.S. Constitution, which is a wonderful, […]
Read MoreMy little girl was born within a week of Christmas and, believe you me, conceiving one to hatch on target like that is no simple task. It takes planning and biotechnology, and the male is force-fed raw oysters, and the female must hang upside down in a dark room for hours. I was 55 at […]
Read MoreI’ve just come from Cambridge, that beehive of brilliance, where nerds don’t feel self-conscious: There’s always someone nerdier nearby. If you are the World’s Leading Authority on the mating habits of the jabberwock beetle of the Lesser Jujube Archipelago, you can take comfort in knowing that the pinch-faced drone next to you at Starbucks may […]
Read MoreI was not ready to see Bruce Springsteen bemedalled at the Kennedy Center Honors last week and I still am not ready. It was less than a year ago the Boss did that fantastic slide across the stage on his knees at the Super Bowl halftime show, thrusting his crotch at 90 million Americans on […]
Read MoreIn Phoenix, the bougainvillea is blooming red against a landscape of buttes and rocks outside my hotel window and interesting cacti that look like cell phone base stations or Modigliani sculptures. Midwesterners who came here long ago slapped grass down on the desert, hoping to make it more like Indianapolis, but Phoenicians have come to […]
Read More