Columns, pieces and posts
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, […]
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 […]