Columns, pieces and posts
The new issue of Charlie Hebdo is out. In Paris it sold out almost immediately and the print run has been upped to a reported five million. On the cover is a cartoon of Muhammad, a tear on his cheek. Tens of millions of people will see it. It is almost enough but not quite. […]
It was a sunny Tuesday in London, Valentine’s Day 1989. The phone rang in the novelist’s home. It was a BBC reporter. At first he was irritated: She didn’t even bother to tell him how she’d gotten his private number. “How does it feel,” she asked, “to know that you have just been sentenced to […]
Now and then a writer hits a nerve. In the case of my column on the threatened closing of my neighborhood church, St. Thomas More, by the Archdiocese of New York, I hit some inflamed and throbbing ones. Here is the column protesting church closings in the archdiocese, questioning the reasons behind them, and offering […]
How are we feeling about 2015? With what attitude are people approaching the new year? What do they expect from it? Let’s ask. Yuval Levin, founding editor of National Affairs, says, “Maybe you know the old joke that a Jewish optimist is one who says, ‘Surely things can’t get worse than this,’ and a Jewish […]
The Archdiocese of New York is threatening to close down my little church, a jewel in Catholicism’s crown on 89th Street just off Madison, in Carnegie Hill, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This has caused great pain in our neighborhood this Christmas. St. Thomas More Church is where my son made his first […]
If a change in policy is in the American national interest, then it is a good idea. If it is not, then it is a bad idea, and something we should not do. In another era that would be so obvious as not to bear repeating. But seeing to our national interests (just as we […]
The “torture report” exists. It shouldn’t—a better, more comprehensive, historically deeper and less partisan document should have been produced, and then held close for mandatory reading by all pertinent current and future officials—but it’s there. Anyone in the world who wants to read it can do a full download, and think what they think. Its […]
Take no bait. Act independently and in accord with national priorities. Cause no pointless trouble. If there’s trouble, it should have a clear, understandable, defendable purpose. That is general advice for the new Republican congressional majority. They will be proving every day they’re a serious governing alternative to the Democratic-dominated establishment that has run Washington […]
There is an odd, magical-thinking element in the psychology of recent White Houses. It is now common for those within them to assume that history will declare their greatness down the road. They proceed as if this is automatic, guaranteed: They will leave someday, history will ponder their accomplishments and announce their genius. The assumption […]
I wrote of this two summers ago: There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen, traveling with his younger brother. They were fleeing the Nazis. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan’s west side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New […]