Columns, pieces and posts
This last in a series on July Fourth themes is about a small sweetness that was gratefully received. As we near our 250th birthday, let us never forget the gift of the Scottish national soccer team and its followers, the famous Tartan Army—the pleasure and delight they gave as they marched through America, drank our […]
As we near America’s 250th birthday, my thoughts keep turning to what we’ll need to get to our 300th. I see three main things. One, a personal and national commitment to endure. We’ve been given this brilliant thing, America, and must shepherd her safely through another 50 years. We can’t know what they’ll hold, but […]
We’ve recently been touching on themes connected to personal biography and the observations of Russian diplomats. This week we go full “hoke,” in a piece about a little bit of hokiness that, 50 years ago, America saw right through and embraced to its deepest heart. A prelude: We need more love in things. The 250th […]
For a long time I have been interested in the stories of those who operated in the top tier of history but weren’t themselves rulers. Many were diplomats whose careers, for all their brilliant efforts, ended in disappointment. One was Sergei Witte, the long-serving finance minister who spent six months as the first prime minister […]
When Conan O’Brien walks into a room people immediately get a merry look, and when he spoke at a university commencement this week it was good to see an air of expectation ripple through the crowd. The flame-haired entertainment icon didn’t disappoint. His message: Be modest. You’ll make mistakes. Don’t be afraid to try. Be […]
I want to mention America’s wide-openness. I don’t mean our traditional openness to foreign-born citizens, which is its own triumph, but our wide-openness to ourselves. It is unique to us, a tradition and a thing of lore. The thought is prompted by the death this week of the movie critic Rex Reed, 87, who was […]
All media this week rang with Ted Turner’s achievements, and if you lived through his rise, the sound of his name brought a wistful smile. What a crazy, fabulous American man. He bought MGM’s library of films and invented Turner Classic Movies to play them; he bought the Atlanta Braves, put them on his superstation […]
I don’t think we fully appreciate how much the country is descending into political violence. We aren’t seeing the speed and pitch of the descent. It is an amazing and little-noted fact that at least four cabinet secretaries in the second Trump administration, including the heads of the State and Defense departments, have reportedly had […]
The first reigning pope in history to visit the U.S., Pope Paul VI, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Oct. 4, 1965. The Cold War was on, India and Pakistan had just been at war, and in Vietnam the U.S. was shifting to large scale combat deployment. So the pontiff told the […]
In the 1950s the Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a half-hour prime-time TV show on Tuesday nights called “Life Is Worth Living.” It addressed the issues of the day through the lens of Catholic thought. To everyone’s surprise, its ratings frequently beat its competitor, Milton Berle’s No. 1 variety show, originally known as “Texaco […]