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
People accuse us old liberals of smarmy self-righteousness and God knows they are right. Four of us had lunch the other day and we agreed before we sat down: no politics. We know what we’re going to say so why say it? Self-righteousness is a good old American vice, and we have it, and though […]
Read MoreIt’s a simple, cheerful life but with occasional grim complications that one simply ignores, such as mortality or the Seventies or the demise of the downtown department store. I love my downtown store, a block from the old stone courthouse where Alvin (Creepy) Karpis of the Ma Barker gang was tried for kidnapping in 1936, […]
Read MoreAnother paradise day in our old river town and we linger over supper in the backyard and talk about the dry weather and bats (Do they eat three thousand mosquitoes per night? No, says the family biologist.) and cousin Bruce’s truck farm besieged by suburban yards and of course Barack Obama’s audacious trip to Iraq […]
Read MoreNEW YORK: New York in July, hot and breezy, the smell of pizza and coffee in the air, and on the subway one is surrounded by women in light summer dresses, the bare shoulders of elegant young urban women whose shoulders tell you they never toted barges or lifted bales, never laid eyes on a […]
Read MoreSummer nights! The fragrant dark descends, the night creatures chitter and chirrup, and we linger on the porch, a little wine in the glass, children coming and going, and we inhale the sweetness of life. In Pasadena, people are lined up outside a bank, hoping to get their money out before it goes belly-up, and […]
Read MoreI stopped by to visit an old friend in Chicago last Sunday, and by “old” I mean 96 years but with all his faculties intact, which makes him a natural wonder you could exhibit on the carnival circuit for two bucks a head, children under ten admitted free with a parent: SEE MAN BORN ON […]
Read MoreA couple hours to kill on a humid afternoon in a small town in Massachusetts and rather than sit looking at hotel wallpaper I took a little walk. A pretty town, well-kept, especially in the historic district where we tourists congregate—old shopfronts that once sold hardware, dry goods, groceries, now selling candles, collectibles and coffee, […]
Read MoreI was at a playground with my daughter the other day, reading “The Two Kinds of Decay” by Sarah Manguso (good book) and watching my girl as she stood at the perimeter of children playing and studied them, exactly as I did when I was a kid, working up the nerve to plunge into the […]
Read MoreEighty-six percent of the American people believe the price of gasoline will climb to five bucks a gallon this year, a big shift in public opinion from a year ago when most people felt that oil prices were spiking high and would soon return to normal—which is 35 cents a gallon, same as a pack […]
Read MoreHot night, New York: a little breeze in the trees in the deep stone canyons as I look out my window, thousands of little lighted windows of private lives, one of which is mine. I’m reminded of this by the fact that a hundred feet away, a man stands at a window looking through binoculars […]
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