Columns, pieces and posts
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, […]
Donald Trump is now criminally charged for actions taken before and after Jan. 6, 2021. He is accused of directing a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution with an intent to retain power after losing the 2020 presidential election. However the politics of the indictment play out, it is right and proper that the case go […]
“Oppenheimer” is a serious movie, which comes as a relief—that such a film can still be made and become, as this one has, a blockbuster. It carries within it a compliment, that the audience is able to absorb intellectually demanding material. It assumes you know who Neils Bohr is. It contains a great on-the-edge-of-your seat […]
I’m neither an entertainment reporter nor an industry veteran, but I watch the business and culture of Hollywood pretty closely, and I have a bad feeling about this strike. I hope I’m wrong, but the struggle between the writers and actors unions and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers looks to me as […]
Once in Manhattan in the 1990s at a lunch to celebrate a friend I met the great philanthropist Brooke Astor. The conversation took a turn and she told us a story of when she was young, in her 20s, in the 1920s. It was a summer day on the north shore of Long Island and […]
If you frequently have a screen on, your impression this summer is that all the hungry things are coming closer in. The sharks are coming closer to shore, the beaches suddenly closed. Bears have been coming in closer for years, deer too. Alligators are advancing onto the golf course and creeping out of the pond. […]
What happened in Russia last weekend? What will it mean for the world? I remember the words of a veteran American diplomat years ago: “Avoid premature joy.” We look at Vladimir Putin and think: That man has been rocked and exposed. He didn’t think an erstwhile ally was going to take arms against him and […]
Why are we still drawn to the Titanic? Why, 111 years after it went down, doesn’t our interest fade? What is the endless lure that billionaires and explorers put their lives in their hands just to see it? What is it about that ship and that story? After its remains were discovered in 1985, the […]
I went back this stunning week to the first columns I’d ever written about Donald Trump, eight years ago, in the summer of 2015. It was for me a powerful experience. Columnists think aloud pretty much in real time, trying to apprehend and express what is true and important. I’ll speak of some of what […]
Here is a small thought that arose from the big firing at CNN. Shifts in personal fortune and unexpected turns remind us of what we know in the abstract and forget in the particular. They remind us that life is not, as a friend once reflected, a painting. In a painting the curtain doesn’t move. […]