Columns, pieces and posts
Reaction to Maya Angelou’s death is going to be broader and deeper than people realize. They’ll say she was a great writer, a teller of experience, a witness. All true. But at the end she was a mystic. A friend who saw this interview, with Oprah Winfrey, said: “She was so close to Heaven.” Angelou […]
New York’s new 9/11 museum is a masterpiece. It is the first big thing built to mark that day that is fully worthy of it. It also struck me as a departure from a growing style among those who create and tend historic sites. That style involves the banishment of meaning—of the particular, of the […]
At the end of the first Gulf War I saw something that startled me and gave me pause. More than 20 years later I can still see the image in my mind, so vivid was the impression it made. It was June 8, 1991. America had just won a dazzling victory. We’d won a war […]
The Benghazi investigation should go forward but with knowledge that it will face heavy partisan and media pushback. Democrats will argue—they already are—that with the country in crisis the attention of Congress should be turned to addressing the issue that weighs most on the public mind: a bad economy with the very top flourishing while […]
George Will made an incisive and spirited case against the Common Core on Tuesday’s “Special Report With Bret Baier. Earlier in the broadcast Michelle Rhee, whose efforts in education have earned her deserved admiration, was invited on to make the case for Common Core. She reverted to the gobbledygook language that educators too often use, […]
Rome Friends and I kept seeing groups of Poles who’d taken planes or 20-hour bus rides to be here for the canonization of John Paul II. They did not look wealthy. A lot of them wouldn’t have had tickets to the big mass because the Vatican kept saying there were no tickets. (In fact there […]
Yesterday on a panel on “Face the Nation,” we briefly discussed Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming memoir of her four years as secretary of state. It is called “Hard Choices”—they appear to be running low at the book-title store—and will be published June 10. The announcement of the title alone made news, which is a measure of […]
On Russia and Ukraine we are experiencing things incrementally and coming to terms with the fact that we have entered a new era. Vladimir Putin has ended the post-Cold War settlement and is redrawing borders. It is childish and obtuse to see his moves and understand them as anything but what they are, the beginning […]
Rome Everyone keeps talking about the Francis Effect. The pope has captured the world’s imagination with his warmth, apparent merriness and palpable affection for those who are poor and imprisoned, in whatever way—jail, loneliness, illness, disability. An American cardinal smiles and shakes his head when he tells me that nowadays his seminaries are full. A […]
Early in the 2012 presidential cycle, a friend and former staffer of Jeb Bush observed to me, bitterly, that this smart, capable man wasn’t included in the names of potential GOP nominees for only one reason: His name was Bush. I said that’s true, but it’s also true that he got his chance in politics […]