Archive: The Wall Street Journal

The Purpose of Journalism Is to Get the Story People love and need real reporting, but reporters have decided their job is something else entirely.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

We are talking about journalism this week, about newspapers and warring newsrooms and lost readership and what to do. At bottom, though this gets lost, all the arguments are really about what journalism is. Here is what it is. It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric […]

The Dishonorable Attack on the Alitos A left-wing activist impressed her comrades, hardened her foes, and got attention. So what?

-- The Wall Street Journal:

I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own. The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June […]

Reagan at Pointe du Hoc, 40 Years Later June 1984 was a tense and dangerous time in the Cold War, but domestic politics were sweeter than today.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

Simi Valley, Calif. I was to write on something else this week but an event in California sent me back in time. Friends of Ronald Reagan gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of his speeches at Normandy (June 6, 1984), and the 20th anniversary of his death (June 5, 2004). The dates remind me that […]

We Are Starting to Enjoy Hatred The country has long been divided, but estrangement has become alluring in the age of Biden and Trump.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

I’m seeing something and maybe you are too. We talk in our country about political polarization and it’s real: We’re split into a thousand pieces within two big camps of left and right. We decry the harshness of our political discourse, particularly online, where outrageous and dehumanizing things are said. But what I’m seeing is […]

Teach Your Children to Love America For Memorial Day, I’m taking inspiration from the New York schools’ 1900 ‘Manual of Patriotism.’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

Some Memorial Day thoughts on the importance of love: Children don’t need to be taught to love their parents. From the moment they come out you are everything to them. They seem to arrive with a certain amount of love built in and fix it on the mother who holds them and looks into their […]

A New Jersey Friend Is Sticking With Trump ‘It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK,’ she says. And ‘he’s very funny and sarcastic.’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

I have a friend who lives in western New Jersey near a lake. Dee is middle aged, works in sales in a service industry, had been a politically independent moderate most of her life, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, less fervently, 2020. When I last saw her, in February, she and her husband […]

2024 Election: A Certain Fatalism Sets In Political pros start to ask if there’s anything President Biden can do to pull out a victory in November.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

Six months to election day and things feel sort of fatalistic. There seems little to discover and nothing new to say about each of the candidates. It’s not going to dawn on you suddenly that Joe Biden is too old and infirm or Donald Trump too crazy. You’ve factored that in. You know what you […]

The Uglification of Everything Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it. You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, […]

Bad Leadership Is a National-Security Threat The American porn-star trial, the tawdry British memoirs—all signal weakness and decadence.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

Most politics is day by day, and certainly we consume it that way. But the thought that presses on my mind has distant horizons. The criminal trial of Donald Trump, de facto Republican presidential nominee, commenced Monday in Manhattan Criminal Court. The case revolves around charges that he directed hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, […]

America in the Age of O.J. Simpson His case gave rise to a new kind of fame and left Americans of all races cynical about the law.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

Our crazy country. The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy and admitting it. It was 30 years ago this June, the murder followed by the Bronco chase, and I find myself wanting to tell those who weren’t there what a sensation it was, what an amazement. Everyone over 40 this […]