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 saw Pavarotti sing “Pagliacci” at Carnegie Hall fifteen years ago and it was pretty good. The great man was a good hundred pounds over his fighting weight and he perspired heavily, but when it came time for him to stand and deliver “Vesti la giubba,” he did it big, a cry from the heart […]
Read MoreYou do not want people to think of the Republican Party every time they step into a public toilet and so the gentleman had to go and why not dispatch him immediately? Why make him stumble through a week of contrition on cable TV and explain himself into an even deeper hole? Nonetheless, it was […]
Read MoreI live in a 1911 house built for a family that had a cook and a housemaid who were short, coming from undernourished countries like Ireland and Sweden, so the back stairway has low clearances, where Mary Margaret or Inga used to hustle down to fix breakfast, and where I now clomp down for coffee […]
Read MoreThey put Jose Padilla away for having filled out an application form to attend an al-Qaida training camp, a milestone in criminal-conspiracy law that makes me wonder about you readers and what you might do that some ambitious prosecutor could trace back to something I wrote sixteen months ago. I’m serious. Here we are, consorting […]
Read MoreWhat truly cheers me up through these dog days of summer is the thought that two old friends of mine are up north on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and that I am not there with them. I am here, reading the paper, and if I wanted to go to a […]
Read MoreWhen the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, several people called me to see if I was okay, and I was in New York, standing in line at H&H Bagels at 80th and Broadway, which came as a disappointment to my friends, calling to commiserate about a tragedy, hoping for a good story (“I crossed that bridge […]
Read MoreIt’s hard to photograph a falling stock market, so the stories about the big Dow Jones plunge showed solemn-faced traders on the floor of the New York exchange or an electronic news banner in Times Square. The banner (what you could see of it) read, “Stocks Plummet Amid Cred,” while in the foreground people crossed […]
Read MoreI was in Norway on vacation and missed all that harrumphing over the commuting of Scooter Libby’s sentence and what a travesty of justice it was and proof of the corruption of the Ornamental Plant Administration, etc. etc. etc. Personally, I find it heartwarming and admire the Current Occupant for admitting, in effect, “This was […]
Read MoreThis 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 […]
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