Columns, pieces and posts
At this dramatic time, with a world on fire, we look at the president and ponder again who he is. Mr. Obama himself mocked how people see him, according to a remarkable piece this week by Peter Baker in the New York Times. NYT +1.10% “Oh, it’s a shame when you have a wan, diffident, […]
President Obama would have been rocked the past few months by five things. One is the building criticism from left and right about his high need for relaxation—playing golf while the world burns. Another is that he misread the significance and public power of the beheadings of American journalists. Third, he has been way out […]
There was nobody like her. Some people are knockoffs or imitations of other, stronger, more vivid figures, but there was never another Joan Rivers before her or while she lived. She was a seriously wonderful, self-invented woman. She was completely open and immediately accessible. She had the warmth of a person who found others keenly […]
It is a muddle, a murk and a desperate-looking thing, the president on the subject of the Islamic State. The Islamic State is the junior varsity. No, it is a “cancer.” We will “degrade and destroy” it. No, we’ll render it “a manageable problem.” It’s all so halting, herky-jerky and, for a great power, embarrassing. […]
Moran, Wyo. Tenderfoot is in big sky country. On the drive from the airport to the ranch, the Tetons, a range of great splendor and dignity that Tenderfoot had thought were two mountains called Grand, are spread before her. It is dusk. To the left the Snake River curls softly against the road. To the […]
I think things just got sparky, a term I once heard a military figure use to denote a battle that has both commenced and turned hot. In her interview in The Atlantic, with Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary Clinton sounded as burly and hawkish on foreign policy as John McCain. That’s not a surprise to longtime Hillary […]
I had a conversation this week with an acquaintance of considerable accomplishment in the political and financial worlds. The talk turned to how some prospective presidential candidates seem to be running to lead two different countries. Rick Perry, say, and Elizabeth Warren experience, see, reflect and approach two very different realities. The conversation then took […]
In this centennial year of the Great War some things have not been said, or at least I haven’t heard them. Among them: All the smart people knew the war would never come. The continent to which war came was on such an upward trajectory in terms of prosperity, inventiveness and political culture that it […]
There are reasons for traditions and arrangements. Sometimes they are good and sometimes not, but they are reasons, explanations grounded in some sort of experience. I had a conversation about this a few years ago with a young senior at Harvard who on graduation would go to work for a great consulting firm that studies […]
Next week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. It was the great disaster of the 20th century, the one that summoned or forced the disasters that would follow, from Lenin and Hitler to World War II and the Cold War. It is still, a century later, almost impossible to believe […]