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
The 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, […]
Read MoreFlowering crabapples are in full purple bloom on both sides of our house. It feels as if we’re a ballroom and soon a crowd of teenagers in strapless gowns and white tuxes will come and stand around, as they do at proms, girls with girls and boys with boys, being elaborately cool and hoping somebody […]
Read MoreSaturday evening I sat on the porch of a little shotgun house on 7th Street in Columbus, Georgia, and breathed sweet and spicy air of magnolia and camellia and honeysuckle, the whole orchestra of Southern fragrance out and about, comforting the afflicted, and I thought of words I’d never ordinarily use, such as “suffused” and […]
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