Columns, pieces and posts
All media this week rang with Ted Turner’s achievements, and if you lived through his rise, the sound of his name brought a wistful smile. What a crazy, fabulous American man. He bought MGM’s library of films and invented Turner Classic Movies to play them; he bought the Atlanta Braves, put them on his superstation […]
I don’t think we fully appreciate how much the country is descending into political violence. We aren’t seeing the speed and pitch of the descent. It is an amazing and little-noted fact that at least four cabinet secretaries in the second Trump administration, including the heads of the State and Defense departments, have reportedly had […]
The first reigning pope in history to visit the U.S., Pope Paul VI, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Oct. 4, 1965. The Cold War was on, India and Pakistan had just been at war, and in Vietnam the U.S. was shifting to large scale combat deployment. So the pontiff told the […]
In the 1950s the Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a half-hour prime-time TV show on Tuesday nights called “Life Is Worth Living.” It addressed the issues of the day through the lens of Catholic thought. To everyone’s surprise, its ratings frequently beat its competitor, Milton Berle’s No. 1 variety show, originally known as “Texaco […]
Cease-fires give hope even if temporary, tenuous and fragile. But does anyone imagine negotiations with Iran in the next two weeks will bear real fruit, resolve central questions? If they don’t, what then? We’re in a fluid, dangerous story that isn’t going away any time soon. But I want to speak of something that made […]
In his Iran speech Wednesday, President Trump asserted much and argued for little. There were some boasts, some threats—“We are going to hit them extremely hard. . . . We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” And some of what appeared to be magical thinking: “When this conflict is […]
A memory from the Massapequa, N.Y., public schools of the late 1950s and early 1960s: We had regular desk drills. The school alarm would pierce the air and teachers would instruct us to slide from our chairs, crouch under our desks facing the floor, and place our hands, fingers interlocked, over our necks. This was […]
Thoughts on Iran have to begin with the awe we feel, again, for the U.S. military. Its professionalism, cool and courage are impressive and inspiring. And we must give Donald Trump his due: His decision was bold, he took a big swing. The end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and scores of his colleagues-in-hellish-rule isn’t bad […]
The president’s State of the Union address came straight from the heart of Crazytown. It had everything—tears, cheers, spectacle. They handed out medals and honors like Oprah in the early 2000s: “You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” At one point I thought he was going to pull out a ceremonial sword and knight […]
When a major Trump administration official gives a speech in Europe to its gathered political and business elites and receives a standing ovation, you know something big happened. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference last weekend had an intellectual presence and warmth not normally seen in the statements of this […]