Columns, pieces and posts
Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday’s holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who’d been my uncle Johnny’s best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were […]
Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to prove she’s a man. She has to prove she’s a woman. She doesn’t have to prove to people that she’s tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief. She doesn’t have to show she could and would wage a war. She has to prove she has normal human […]
Go deeper. That’s what I keep thinking as Americans fight the Washington establishment (the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, their big contributors) on immigration. Go deeper. Look at the real emotions driving the struggle as opposed to what politicians and the media claim are “the high emotions surrounding this issue.” You know what I think […]
“The Sopranos” wasn’t only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time. You know the story, and if you don’t, you’ve absorbed enough along the way as you overheard people chat Monday morning around what we […]
What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker—”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White […]
Why do people want to come here? Same reasons as a hundred years ago. For a job. For opportunity. To rise. To be in a place where one generation you can be a bathroom attendant at a Brooklyn store and the next your boy can be the star of “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour,” with everyone […]
Having watched the second Republican debate the other night, it’s clear to me the subject today is Fred Thompson, the man who wasn’t there. While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear—boxers, briefs and temple garments. He is running a […]
Who woke up Old Europe? France, Ireland and England this week showed us the future. They were the center of the new. It looked good. We can learn from them. First Ireland, which Tuesday formalized a peace that most who love that country would not have thought possible in our lifetimes. And it was barely […]
They stood earnestly in a row, combed, primped and prepped, as Nancy Reagan gazed up at them with courteous interest. But behind the hopeful candidates, a dwarfing shadow loomed, a shadow almost palpable in its power to remind Republicans of the days when men were men and the party was united. His power is only […]
This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big—400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak—and eye-catching, as would be anything that “presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America’s indigenous people by […]