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
They 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 […]
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, […]
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