How to pass healthcare reform
There are some things we will never understand. Death, for one. I overheard a woman in the drugstore say, “He went into the hospital yesterday and he was eating his supper and then he fell asleep and...
View ArticleStaking out my aesthetic
I was in Chicago with time on my hands and the sweet woman murmured to me — you know how this goes — “Would you like to see the Art Institute?” and I was thinking No No No God No, and I said, “Sure....
View ArticleThe dinner of all dinners
We now interrupt Mrs. Palin’s book tour to bring you Thanksgiving, a grand old holiday, and we in the book business are thankful for her, that a busy woman who wanted to tell her story chose the medium...
View ArticleRepublicans play Scrooge, minus the change of heart
In Phoenix, the bougainvillea is blooming red against a landscape of buttes and rocks outside my hotel window and interesting cacti that look like cellphone base stations or Modigliani sculptures....
View Article‘Tis the season to be grumpy
I was not ready to see Bruce Springsteen bemedaled at the Kennedy Center Honors last week and I still am not ready. It was less than a year ago the Boss did that fantastic slide across the stage on his...
View ArticleDon’t mess with Christmas
I’ve just come from Cambridge, that beehive of brilliance, where nerds don’t feel self-conscious: There’s always someone nerdier nearby. If you are the World’s Leading Authority on the mating habits of...
View ArticleMy Christmas vision
My little girl was born within a week of Christmas and, believe you me, conceiving one to hatch on target like that is no simple task. It takes planning and biotechnology, and the male is force-fed raw...
View ArticleGod changes with the weather
It is possible in this day and age to fly south in December and three hours later land in a city where you can sit comfortably in your T-shirt and linen jacket and eat your dinner at a cafe under palm...
View ArticleHow I spent my winter vacation
The cruise ships sail from Tampa and Fort Lauderdale and Miami, great oceangoing pueblos, 10 decks high, passengers lounging on their verandas, gazing at the sea, workhorse Americans trying to get out...
View ArticleSocial separation breeds contempt
I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the...
View ArticleArousing alarm is easy, teaching is tough
The tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don’t have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms — we prefer to sit quietly...
View ArticleLet the uninsured die
There they all were on the Sunday-morning chatfests, droning on about the anger of the American people as shown by the election in Massachusetts of a pickup truck to the U.S. Senate — ever ready, as...
View ArticleGet busy, Democrats
It is a large moment for Democrats, learning to stick with a good man through a rough period when the people who crave disillusionment have become disillusioned. It’s like a winter vacation in the...
View ArticleConspiracy shopping
If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional...
View ArticleThe appeal of unreality
Ever since that night in June when we filed onto the football field in our mortarboards and gowns and the distinguished speaker (what was his name?) informed us that we were entering a time of rapid...
View ArticlePlay ball!
We have a good guy in the White House, a smart man of judicious temperament and profound ideals, a man with a sweet private life, a man of dignity and good humor, whose enemies, waving their hairy arms...
View ArticleA toast to your health
The mind glazes over at the sight of the words so let’s just refer to it as hrothgar reform and congratulate the president and Mrs. Pelosi for pushing it through Congress, a rational reform that the...
View ArticleThe old America is fading
It is spring glorious spring (da do ron ron ron da do ron ron) and our gallant president has rallied his fractious forces against wacko demagoguery, the crocuses are up, and birds are returning from...
View ArticleWhere’s our old-fashioned government jobs program?
I think of myself as conservative and that’s why it was so irritating last Sunday in church when we were instructed to cry out gladly on cue, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia,” and so I did not. An...
View ArticleThe sensible virtues
Said it before, say it again: It’s a great country, and one of its beauties is freedom of expression, freer now than ever before, and another is a general amiability that you find everywhere, the...
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