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
Exhausted Faculty, Anxious Graduates, Weepy Parents and Angry Taxpayers: It’s a great privilege to be your commencement speaker, but nevertheless I will be brief. First, my congratulations. I wish you a good career and a wonderful life. In fact, life is pretty good in America today, except for the fact that there is more self-pity than ever before, but that is the fault of my generation, a glum bunch to be sure. We are counting on you graduates to do better.
Read MoreSomewhere, when I was young, I got the idea that the average American couple had sex twice a week, and I’ve carried this figure in my head for more than 30 years, as a benchmark, like the .300 batting average or the idea of three square meals a day.
Read MoreThese perfect fall days make me sad, and there have been so many of them lately in Minnesota. My cure for sadness is, first, to clean off my glasses and, second, to take a fast ride on a bicycle. If that doesn’t work, I go to Murray’s. The next step is to join the Men in Their 50s Coping with Melancholy group, and I’ve never had to do that.
Read MoreIt is a wicked world, in which the power of any individual to cause suffering is so great and his power to do good is so slight, but here we are, the week of our beloved national feast, and signs of loving Providence are everywhere around us.
Read MoreIt is cold in the Midwest, winter is coming, and despite our best efforts, we are still getting older. The fabulous anti-aging vitamin cathline-b discovered in burdock and the fiddlehead fern was discovered too late for us; bales of burdock wouldn’t make us a minute younger.
Read MoreI 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 […]
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