Columns, pieces and posts
To the president’s speech explaining his decision to step aside: I wanted to be moved and informed and wound up impatient. It was a speech that carried a high degree of difficulty. A president of the United States with six months to go can’t declare to the world, “I’d love to stay longer but let’s […]
I will make something clear before sharing some honest, perhaps startling thoughts. I did not support either of the major party presidential candidates in 2016 and wrote about it here. I could not endorse either in 2020, and explained why here. I fully expect my third consecutive write-in this November, for the same reasons as […]
Oh no, not again. I got that feeling you get of chaos and horror and no one in charge. That terrible, cratering feeling you’ve had before. I was watching it live, on television, as I readied to go to dinner. Donald Trump was in a red MAGA hat, talking about the border. I turned away […]
Everything is about to change. It won’t stay stuck. We don’t know exactly how the change will come but it will come, because what we have now can’t continue. Joe Biden can’t sustain a demanding campaign and is incapable of functioning for 4½ more years as the American president. We all know this. Only three […]
We are living big history. We do that so often we don’t always notice. But a proud president is hunkered down in the White House, and his party is frantically trying to decide whether to press him to step aside from his bid for re-election after a catastrophic 90 minutes revealing that he is neurologically […]
In the weeks before CNN’s presidential debate I was skeptical of its significance. I didn’t see a dramatic, high-stakes, pivotal showdown coming, only a moderately sized, pro forma moment in a long, drawn-out campaign. The format had too many prohibitions—muted mics, no open discussion, no live audience, no opening statements, no talking to aides during […]
We are talking about journalism this week, about newspapers and warring newsrooms and lost readership and what to do. At bottom, though this gets lost, all the arguments are really about what journalism is. Here is what it is. It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric […]
I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own. The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June […]
Simi Valley, Calif. I was to write on something else this week but an event in California sent me back in time. Friends of Ronald Reagan gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of his speeches at Normandy (June 6, 1984), and the 20th anniversary of his death (June 5, 2004). The dates remind me that […]
I’m seeing something and maybe you are too. We talk in our country about political polarization and it’s real: We’re split into a thousand pieces within two big camps of left and right. We decry the harshness of our political discourse, particularly online, where outrageous and dehumanizing things are said. But what I’m seeing is […]