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
One simply wanted to be present. Freezing cold or not, a crowd of 2 million, whatever — solemn warnings about tight security, long lines, traffic jams, cell phones not working. In the end, one wanted to be there on the Mall before the Capitol on Tuesday at noon amid the jubilant throng and see the […]
Read MoreI like this government report saying that more Americans than before are reading novels and short stories, 113 million, in fact. Fiction is my cash crop, and that’s good news. Too bad, though, that the report was issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. A deep-down aversion to a-r-t is one big reason half […]
Read MoreWhen you look at the audience numbers for TV and then add up the incarcerated felons, Alzheimer’s patients and confirmed barflies in America, it dawns on you who is watching TV these days — people unable to lead normal productive lives — and yet they give out awards for this stuff and the hosts of […]
Read MoreMinnesotans are a humorous people and we are attempting to elect a comedian to the U.S. Senate, which is delicate work, as you might guess. You shouldn’t sweep a comedian into office on a wave of public adulation any more than you should let him win the heroine in the first reel and fly off […]
Read MoreIt is the blessed Christmas season. But of course you know that. Unless you live ten miles up a box canyon deep in the Wasatch Range with only your dog Boomer and are demented from drinking bad water, you are inhaling Christmas night and day and “Adeste Fideles” is stuck in your head like a […]
Read MoreIt is rather haunting, the notice above the Flush button in the toilet on the airliner, “Do Not Flush While Seated On Toilet.” One imagines the engineers of the toilet running tests with flush dummies with big flat butts and the suction ripping the stuffing right out of them, and the engineers thinking, “Oh criminy, […]
Read MoreThe Christmas tree in Rice Park in St. Paul is taller than the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York, 90 feet compared to 72, but New York’s is the Tree de la Tree, the Tree Iconic, the one that you’ll see on national TV, just as the Tonys get the attention even though there’s […]
Read MoreI’ve been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men’s room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of […]
Read MoreI have bad news. In the midst of the worldwide economic meltdown we are experiencing these days, I have taken a hard look at revenue from this column and find that I am earning but a tiny fraction of the $6.5 million I had projected for 2008, which leaves me no choice but to impose […]
Read MoreI don’t know why flight attendants put a skinny plastic swizzle stick in your cup of coffee, but there it is, and the other day, I brought the coffee to my lips and stuck the stick way up into my nostril, which gives an odd sensation, pain and also shame of course and slight nausea […]
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