Columns, pieces and posts
‘Took my first DC trip yesterday since pre-COVID. Union Station mostly deserted, hardly any stores/restaurants open. 2 homeless guys hanging out & begging in the seating area at Sbarro’s. Real ‘decline of the republic’ vibe in the building. The election results didn’t surprise me.”—the Week columnist Damon Linker on Twitter Wednesday “What a weird thing […]
In a way Republicans have already won in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and longtime party mover, has been forced to fight for his life in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points. If Mr. McAuliffe pulls it out Tuesday, his not-so-Trumpy challenger, Glenn Youngkin, will still have come close in the […]
Condoleezza Rice tells a story that she wrote about this week in the Washington Post after the death of Colin Powell. We spoke about it by phone. It was 2003, President George W. Bush’s first state visit to Britain, and there was a dinner in Buckingham Palace given by the queen. Ms. Rice, then White […]
Captain Kirk was in space. “I hope I never recover from this,” William Shatner said after the capsule set down in scrub near Van Horn, Texas. He’d seen the blueness, the thin ribbon of earth’s atmosphere, the delicacy and majesty. “I hope I can maintain what I feel now, I don’t want to lose it,” […]
Washington Our capital is greatly diminished compared with its old crackling pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd self. It is quieter, less bustling, drabber. A lot of government employees are still working at home, and you can feel it in the air, the sense that the federal government is coming out of everyone’s dining room. It was my […]
The White House should be feeling alarm. It hasn’t been a good summer for the president, and it isn’t looking to be a good fall. The manner and timing of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe that left Americans infuriated and ashamed. The president’s statements and interviews in the aftermath were highly unsuccessful. The […]
Two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call “on a top secret, back-channel line,” to his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng. This is from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril.” Gen. Milley believed Gen. Li and others in the […]
I want to stay with 9/11 to say something that struck me hard after the ceremonies last Saturday. The grief felt and expressed had to do with more than the memories of that day 20 years ago. It also had to do with right now. It had to do with a sense that we are […]
Once when I was little, seven or so, I was sitting on the couch with my Uncle Johnny and we were watching something about Memorial Day. Johnny was about 30, a veteran of Korea, and on a day off from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On the TV they showed a cemetery and at the end […]
August changed things; it wasn’t just a bad month. It left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of “This isn’t how we do things.” We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the flinty, determined president looking flinty and determined on the 20th anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic […]