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
Minnesotans 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 […]
Read MoreBe happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, […]
Read MoreA golden November day under a blue sky and an air of sweet amiability at the polls and at the end of the day, we elected the right guy, no doubt about it. Yes, we can and we did. A nation spread its wings and achieved altitude. Bravo, Barack, Mr. Steady, who cheerfully did the […]
Read MoreI was messing around in Tulsa last week and got talking with a big burly man with a McCain/Palin pin on his blue blazer who told me he was descended from yellow-dog Democrats who thought the sun rose and set over FDR and Republicans were people who wore spats and top hats and sailed off […]
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