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 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 MoreWe now interrupt Mrs. Palin’s book tour to bring you Thanksgiving, a grand old holiday, and we in the book business are thankful for her, that a busy woman who wanted to tell her story chose the medium of ink and paper between hard covers. Her tour is not about politics. It’s about books. Those […]
Read MoreI was in Chicago with time on my hands and the sweet woman murmured to me — you know how this goes — “Would you like to see the Art Institute?” and I was thinking No No No God No, and I said, “Sure. Fine.” “You wouldn’t rather do something else?” she said. “No,” I […]
Read MoreThere are some things we will never understand. Death, for one. I overheard a woman in the drugstore say, “He went in to the hospital yesterday and he was eating his supper and then he fell asleep and then he died. I don’t get it.” She didn’t seem grief-stricken, just uncomprehending. (Why did it have […]
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