Columns, pieces and posts
On Memorial Day we have a duty to remember. Part of how we remember is through film. Its makers should be thanked for capturing war’s valor and loss. World War II got the great movies, scores of them. There are acknowledged classics—“The Bridge on the River Kwai,” directed by David Lean, with a long-uncredited screenplay […]
You know of broken-windows theory. It is the insight, promulgated by the social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, that visible signs of disorder, left untended, stimulate further disorder and crime. This was common sense presented with an academic gloss, and is exactly what your grandmother told you: If you don’t replace […]
White smoke. The cardinals moved quickly, after only four or five ballots. Is that a good sign? But the smoke is white, and people came running, and the crowd in St. Peter’s Square burst into sustained cheers, with chanting and then laughing, and the huge ancient bells began to ring. On the Vatican feed the […]
Donald Trump, an overview: America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I […]
Pope Francis’ great contribution was to present the Catholic Church as a lover of all people. He called it “a field hospital after battle,” a refuge and place of repair. It must “go to the peripheries, which are often filled with solitude, sadness, inner wounds and loss of a zest for life.” Many saw in […]
This being Holy Week and Passover, a small reflection on Scripture. There are stories and moments in the Old and New Testaments that grab hold of us, some from the first time we heard them, and stay. One, for me, is the story of the good thief. Christ is on the cross, being put to […]
Some thoughts on a climbdown for the ages. The reaction was widespread relief in America and the world. Americans want their country to be the world’s growth engine but not, as a former Reagan administration official put it, through policies “that risk the collapse of the global financial system.” Donald Trump scared people he hadn’t […]
In a news conference in Ottawa on March 27, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reacted to developments in what he called “the trade crisis” with the United States. President Trump, he said, had violated existing trade agreements by imposing on Canada “unjustified” tariffs. “We will respond forcefully. Nothing is off the table.” “We will fight […]
The Signal mess is a real mess, not something that will fade away quickly, because it’s one of those scandals that give the world a picture of a new administration. At just about this time in John F. Kennedy’s presidency (April 17-20, 1961) came the Bay of Pigs disaster, the failed invasion of Cuba by […]
Every big Trumpian news story, and there are five a day, is a dot in a pointillist painting. The whole picture hasn’t yet emerged but became fuller this week. The most powerful, in terms of implications, is in the courts. A federal district judge in Washington issued a temporary restraining order to pause deportation flights […]