Columns, pieces and posts
When I was a teenager my family’s house burned down and every possession but our car was lost. This was in Rutherford, N.J., in 1969 on a Saturday night in May. At some point before midnight a lamp without a shade fell over on a bed upstairs, and a fire started that no one saw […]
Two big speeches are coming up, President-elect Trump’s Inaugural Address on Monday, Jan. 20, and President Biden’s farewell address, expected in the days just preceding. To Mr. Trump: Turn the page on this historical moment and how people see you. Last time you gave an inaugural address, it was grim and dark. “Mothers and children […]
I start the year with some things I know because life and a few geniuses taught me. They’re things often at the back of my mind. An Italian grandmother was stirring the sauce on the stove as I, age about 10, and my friend, her granddaughter, fantasized about how a local family must be rich, […]
We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians. The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word […]
I closed the year with a book tour that ends as Christmas comes. It was sheer pleasure to talk to journalists about their preoccupations, to go to bookstores and signings and meet readers and hear what’s on their minds. When asked why I wrote the book I’d say it was because I wanted to give […]
Like Donald Trump or dislike him, hate him or love him, doesn’t matter: You have to see that what we are witnessing right now is truly remarkable, with no precedent. He is essentially functioning as the sitting president. In the past, a man was elected and sat in his house, met with potential cabinet members, […]
We’re seeing bipartisan slippage of standards. It is embarrassing as a citizen to see the president of the United States pardon his son, and in such an all-encompassing way, for any legal transgression going back nearly 11 years, which feels like a concession to the assumption that his more interesting law-stretching or -breaking may be […]
By the time Donald Trump is inaugurated president on Jan. 20, 2025, a lot of people will think he’s already been president for a year. All eyes, every day, have been on Mar-a-Lago, from which have come a constant barrage of appointments, some good, some half-mad, a few promising electrifying confirmation hearings. But that is […]
The first wave of nominees to the Trump administration announced this week included normal Republicans—Susie Wiles as chief of staff, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency, Marco Rubio as secretary of state. All are grown-up players who have political histories that preceded Donald Trump and became […]
It is worth being moved that in our huge, restive, cynical and yearning nation we peacefully, and with complete public acceptance of the outcome, made a dramatic national judgment this week. Just about every adult citizen took part and took it seriously. All together they produced something we needed: a clear outcome, one delivered without […]