Columns, pieces and posts
I saw “American Sniper” last night. It is not a great movie but it is a powerful one. It had the power to leave a packed Manhattan movie house silent—really, completely silent—as they stared at the closing credits and tried to absorb the meaning of what they’d seen. They filed out silently, too. It’s not […]
This is a good day, with the snow starting to come down heavy in storm-braced New York, to look at the only memorable image to come from the State of the Union address. That image came from the response, by Joni Ernst, Iowa’s new U.S. senator. She spoke, at the top of the speech, of […]
Hershey, Pa. A conversation with a Republican governor who is a possible presidential aspirant: I told him I’d been thinking about something and wanted his response. You can argue that a governor is a better presidential nominee than a senator because governors, unlike lawmakers, have to do something and can be judged by their performance, […]
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 […]