Columns, pieces and posts
I continue to think about the fault lines exposed by what has happened in Gaza, including the generational division on support for Israel. Political splits between old and young aren’t new. May 1968 in France was a split between college students and their elders and it was fierce and culture-changing. When I was in college, […]
This is about describing and showing and making things clear. In the fog of war these things are never more essential. Here is some first-rate describing, from Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker, in a piece called “The Devastation of Be’eri.” Be’eri is a kibbutz three miles from Israel’s border with Gaza. Hamas terrorists came […]
It’s a powder keg, a story unfolding with the highest possible stakes. An interesting aspect: We know more than we did last week, but I haven’t seen any minds change. People are where they started. I am also. Now and then you just want to share your worries. Here is one of mine, one of […]
We are again in a new place. What has happened in Israel the past week is different. I have spent much of my life as you have, hearing regular reports of fighting in the Mideast, so when news broke last Saturday of what was happening near Gaza my mind started to process it as a […]
I want to respond to the toppling of Speaker Kevin McCarthy with the gravity appropriate to a signal event that carries such immense implications (America’s reputation for stability once again weakened, a government shutdown looming, no replacement in sight). Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened […]
I meant to write on the debate this week but found the event unsatisfying in a way I couldn’t characterize. Twenty minutes in I wrote my first note: “Is there such a thing as boring bedlam?” All the candidates seemed to be doing their best in predictable ways, but nothing came together. I thought Nikki […]
For years I’ve had a thought whose expression I could never get right, but it applies to our subject this week, so here goes: Since the triumphant end of World War II, America has come to enjoy greatly the idea of its pre-eminence. We’re “the leader of the free world,” we dominate science, medicine, philanthropy. […]
It’s been a week of “step away” stories for President Biden, the most significant of which came from the normally sympathetic David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His argument was clear and gently put: Mr. Biden is an admirable figure who’s won great victories, but age has taken too much from him. His supporters can […]
Joe Biden is in one of those seasons in which people are noting, again, that he often tells stories about his life that aren’t true. This is bubbling around largely because the week’s polls indicate his own party’s voters think he is too old to be president, and its donors and officials are frustrated he […]
My great memory of this summer is reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” In all these years I never had. In college I majored in British and American literature, so didn’t have to. I expected I’d catch up with it along the way, but I didn’t. For one thing it was huge, more than 1,000 pages, […]