Columns, pieces and posts
He got 51% of a modest turnout in a small state, but a win’s a win and a 30-point win is a landslide. Still, part of what we saw in Iowa was Donald Trump’s continual losing battle with himself. His Des Moines victory speech was unusually gracious and statesmanlike. The strategy was to reassure moderates […]
Finally we vote. Iowa is Monday, New Hampshire a week from Tuesday. I refuse to see the story as over. “Nothing is written.” Both big parties look set on making a mistake, but there’s time to turn it around. Democrats on the ground are making a mistake in not rebelling against the inevitability of Joe […]
Thoughts arising from the incident at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and the extraordinary exit: On Tuesday Japan Airlines Flight 516, carrying 367 passengers, many of them revelers returning from the New Year’s holiday, collided on landing with a Japanese coast-guard plane that was carrying supplies for earthquake survivors of the Noto Peninsula. Five of the six […]
Twenty-three skidoo. Goodbye, honey. A new year begins. I’ve been reading the past 12 months’ work with the aim of doing a what-I-got-right-and-wrong column, but find I didn’t make many predictions. One, last month, was that Taylor Swift would be Time’s person of the year, which she was; another, in May, was that Donald Trump […]
We are a polarized nation, we all know this. In that circumstance, as a matter of our continuance, we have to keep from pushing each other too hard, too roughly. We are a nation of 330 million people with different views. We can move forward and hold on only with patience and respect. When you’re […]
Fareed Zakaria opened his CNN show last weekend with a commentary that seemed to me a signal moment in the DEI/woke/identity-politics wars. I don’t know how Mr. Zakaria would characterize his political views, but there was a quality of something building within him that finally came out. It was an earnest commentary that perhaps took […]
At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old […]
Recently while sharing a meal an acquaintance said something arresting. We were speaking, as happy pessimists do, about where the 21st century went wrong. We’re almost a quarter-century into it, it’s already taken on a certain general shape and character, and I’m not sure I see much good in it beyond advances in medicine and […]
Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be […]
The crisis of comportment on Capitol Hill is getting worse. Two months ago it was an argument over whether senators should be allowed to wear children’s play clothes on the floor, because one senator felt this was emotionally necessary for him. His emotions were overridden and the old dress code restored. Now it is how […]