Columns, pieces and posts
I was at a wedding, standing just off the dance floor, when a pleasant young man in his 20s approached, introduced himself and asked where I’d had my hair done. I shook his offered hand and began to answer, but before I could he said, “I’m gay, by the way.” I nodded as if this […]
The case of John Bolton is about politics (unhousebroken conservatives must be stopped), payback (you tick me off, I’ll pick you off) and personality. People who have worked with him allege he is heavy-handed, curmudgeonly and not necessarily lovably so. I don’t know him, but I suspect there’s some truth in it. Do the charges […]
There were many moving and dramatic moments in Rome two days ago, but this is the one I think I’ll remember: the sight of them running. Did you see them running to St. Peter’s Square as the bells began to toll? They came running in from the offices and streets of Rome, running in their […]
You are a cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, a modern man, and for the past seven days, in private conversations in Rome with cardinals you trust, you’ve been admitting what you would never say in public. You were shocked at the outpouring for John Paul II. You were shocked at the […]
Everyone has spoken this past week of John Paul II’s role in the defeat of Soviet communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe. We don’t know everything, or even a lot, about the quiet diplomatic moves—what happened in private, what kind of communications the pope had with the other great lions of the 1980s, Reagan […]
I have taken a few days off and gone to a place where there are beaches, palm trees, tan people, men in shorts and cotton-weave shirts, and women in sky-blue and pink and yellow dresses and broad-brimmed straw hats. It is nice here. The breeze is gentle and unstopping. In the houses you can smell […]
God made the world or he didn’t. God made you or he didn’t. If he did, your little human life is, and has been, touched by the divine. If this is true, it would be true of all humans, not only some. And so—again, if it is true—each human life is precious, of infinite value, […]
It appears we’ve reached the pivotal moment in the Terri Schiavo case, and it also appears our politicians, our senators and congressmen, might benefit from some observations. In America today all big stories have three dimensions: a legal angle, a public-relations angle and a political angle. In the Schiavo case some of our politicians seem […]
Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours. This is Nichols’s mug shot. This is Nichols’s face after he gave himself up to police Saturday. Something changed. Something happened. This is from the transcript of Ashley Smith’s testimony when she met with reporters in her lawyer’s office on Sunday, March 13: It was […]
There are two predominant journalistic memes since the Arab spring began. The first, from the left: What if Bush was right? This was most famously and appropriately grappled with on Comedy Central, when Democratic foreign-policy thinker Nancy Soderberg consoled Jon Stewart with the hopefully facetious, but either way revealing, advice to hang on, things can […]