Columns, pieces and posts
He was dying for years and the day came and somehow it came as a blow. Not a loss but a blow. How could this be? Maybe we were all of us more loyal to him, and to the meaning of his life, than we quite meant to be. And maybe it’s more. This was […]
Television will be full of reports this weekend of the festivities surrounding the 60th anniversary of D-Day. This has me thinking of why we still talk about the invasion, why television news producers are certain we are interested, and why the programmers of movie channels believe we will want to see “The Longest Day” again, […]
I have been paying attention to the graduates of Ivy League universities. Every one I see the past few weeks is beautiful. They are tall and handsome and gay-spirited; they are strong and laughing and bright. I ask them what they are going to do now. I am repeatedly told things like, “I want to […]
“The Justice Department and the FBI plan to ask for the public’s help today in locating several suspected terrorist sympathizers, including some whose names have not been made public before. The bureau probably plans another public push to find Aafia Siddiqui, 32, a Pakistani woman who has a doctorate in neurological science and has studied […]
Did you hear about the college commencement speaker who was almost booed off the stage Sunday because his commencement address was an anti-Bush rant? The speaker was E.L. Doctorow. The college, God bless it forever, was Hofstra University on New York’s Long Island. Newsday reported that Mr. Doctorow—or, as Newsday put it in the first […]
I notice lately everyone I talk to has a new insight or a big theory. In the past week I bumped into two journalists who with cool eyes watch the national scene. The first was in Washington. She told me she’d just been taken aside by a savvy Democratic operative who told her, “It’s going […]
I share an obsession with Tony Soprano. This startles me and makes me unhappy because it has been my experience that once my inner fears are echoed in the outer culture, some kind of grim critical mass has been achieved, and trouble ensues. (Does this sound oddly egocentric, even for a pundit? I think it […]
Are reports of abuse by Americans at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison hyped and sensationalized? Probably. The world media are in the sensation-making business and it’s a world-wide story. Did the abuses occur? Obviously. There are pictures, testimony, an apology Wednesday from the U.S. general who now runs the prisons and denunciations of the abuse as […]
Every now and then you witness a small moment that is actually a big moment. Maybe it alerts you to something surprising that’s going on, or maybe it illustrates what you already know but in a new way, one that can’t be dodged or avoided. It happened to me the other day at a play, […]
(Editor’s note: This column appeared on July 12, 2002. Pat Tillman died in combat in Afghanistan yesterday.) Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don’t know because […]