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
This week I am traveling around the part of Norway you see in the travel brochures — the fjords with picturesque villages on the shores, forested mountains with thousand-foot waterfalls coursing down the precipices, old wooden fishing boats anchored in the harbor, old churches. An American walks around and wonders, “Where are the auto salvage […]
Read MoreIt may seem craven to say so, but a person really had to wonder at the inability of trained medical personnel to hook wire A to battery B to alarm clock C and detonate a car loaded with gasoline and nails in London. And then having to resort to the rather amateurish alternative of crashing […]
Read MoreThe phone rang on Monday and the caller ID screen said “Unknown Caller, Unknown Number,” which suggests that somebody with a headset in a cubicle wants to know if I would like to send them some money, but I picked up anyway and it was a woman reporter in Australia wanting to know how Americans […]
Read MoreConsumer confidence was down in June, and so was mine, though for other reasons. I see politics stuck in a spiral of dumbness and the Republican candidates — the Cavalcade of Unhappy White Men — leading the way. The other day, Mr. Giuliani came out against “putting government in a situation where government is in […]
Read MoreThe sign at the airport said, “THREAT LEVEL ORANGE” but I ignored it and went into the terminal where nobody unknown to me asked me to carry anything aboard the plane and I saw nothing suspicious to report to authorities. The truly suspicious people these days are the authorities. When I got to Chicago, however, […]
Read MoreIt used to be that Los Angelenos were much too cool to express outright pride in their city, feeling that boosterism is for yahoos from the Midwest, but when I was there last week I got an earful about what a good place it is from friends who never said anything like that to me […]
Read MoreI bought a jar of elderberry jelly and an armload of rhubarb at a small-town festival last week, simply because the seller was a slender fair-haired luminous beauty who happened to be Amish, sitting, demure in a black bonnet, at a table beside her horse and buggy. She looked like an actress miscast for the […]
Read MoreMemorial Day is a lovely day in America, a day of reunion in small towns, where people drive up to the cemetery on Monday morning and file in, old-timers carrying lawn chairs, and even if you’ve missed a few years, people will come over and shake your hand and thank you for coming. You don’t […]
Read MoreI know nothing about what is going on in the country, I hear nothing, I have nothing to say, I am a writer locked up with a book that is due on Tuesday, so I am taking a break. No big deal. Everybody’s writing a book. In libraries and back rooms and parents’ basements, men […]
Read MoreGorgeous green spring came suddenly to Minnesota this year after weeks of tedious budding and blooming, a great burgeoning of foliage, and Bleak Street became the Via Paradiso, and we pale stoics took out pen and paper and wrote, “O love love love you are the best who ever was” or words to that effect, […]
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