Columns, pieces and posts
We are living big history. We do that so often we don’t always notice. But a proud president is hunkered down in the White House, and his party is frantically trying to decide whether to press him to step aside from his bid for re-election after a catastrophic 90 minutes revealing that he is neurologically […]
In the weeks before CNN’s presidential debate I was skeptical of its significance. I didn’t see a dramatic, high-stakes, pivotal showdown coming, only a moderately sized, pro forma moment in a long, drawn-out campaign. The format had too many prohibitions—muted mics, no open discussion, no live audience, no opening statements, no talking to aides during […]
We are talking about journalism this week, about newspapers and warring newsrooms and lost readership and what to do. At bottom, though this gets lost, all the arguments are really about what journalism is. Here is what it is. It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric […]
I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own. The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June […]
Simi Valley, Calif. I was to write on something else this week but an event in California sent me back in time. Friends of Ronald Reagan gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of his speeches at Normandy (June 6, 1984), and the 20th anniversary of his death (June 5, 2004). The dates remind me that […]
I’m seeing something and maybe you are too. We talk in our country about political polarization and it’s real: We’re split into a thousand pieces within two big camps of left and right. We decry the harshness of our political discourse, particularly online, where outrageous and dehumanizing things are said. But what I’m seeing is […]
Some Memorial Day thoughts on the importance of love: Children don’t need to be taught to love their parents. From the moment they come out you are everything to them. They seem to arrive with a certain amount of love built in and fix it on the mother who holds them and looks into their […]
I have a friend who lives in western New Jersey near a lake. Dee is middle aged, works in sales in a service industry, had been a politically independent moderate most of her life, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, less fervently, 2020. When I last saw her, in February, she and her husband […]
Six months to election day and things feel sort of fatalistic. There seems little to discover and nothing new to say about each of the candidates. It’s not going to dawn on you suddenly that Joe Biden is too old and infirm or Donald Trump too crazy. You’ve factored that in. You know what you […]
I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it. You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, […]