Columns, pieces and posts
For a long time I have been interested in the stories of those who operated in the top tier of history but weren’t themselves rulers. Many were diplomats whose careers, for all their brilliant efforts, ended in disappointment. One was Sergei Witte, the long-serving finance minister who spent six months as the first prime minister […]
When Conan O’Brien walks into a room people immediately get a merry look, and when he spoke at a university commencement this week it was good to see an air of expectation ripple through the crowd. The flame-haired entertainment icon didn’t disappoint. His message: Be modest. You’ll make mistakes. Don’t be afraid to try. Be […]
I want to mention America’s wide-openness. I don’t mean our traditional openness to foreign-born citizens, which is its own triumph, but our wide-openness to ourselves. It is unique to us, a tradition and a thing of lore. The thought is prompted by the death this week of the movie critic Rex Reed, 87, who was […]
All media this week rang with Ted Turner’s achievements, and if you lived through his rise, the sound of his name brought a wistful smile. What a crazy, fabulous American man. He bought MGM’s library of films and invented Turner Classic Movies to play them; he bought the Atlanta Braves, put them on his superstation […]
I don’t think we fully appreciate how much the country is descending into political violence. We aren’t seeing the speed and pitch of the descent. It is an amazing and little-noted fact that at least four cabinet secretaries in the second Trump administration, including the heads of the State and Defense departments, have reportedly had […]
The first reigning pope in history to visit the U.S., Pope Paul VI, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Oct. 4, 1965. The Cold War was on, India and Pakistan had just been at war, and in Vietnam the U.S. was shifting to large scale combat deployment. So the pontiff told the […]
In the 1950s the Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a half-hour prime-time TV show on Tuesday nights called “Life Is Worth Living.” It addressed the issues of the day through the lens of Catholic thought. To everyone’s surprise, its ratings frequently beat its competitor, Milton Berle’s No. 1 variety show, originally known as “Texaco […]
Cease-fires give hope even if temporary, tenuous and fragile. But does anyone imagine negotiations with Iran in the next two weeks will bear real fruit, resolve central questions? If they don’t, what then? We’re in a fluid, dangerous story that isn’t going away any time soon. But I want to speak of something that made […]
In his Iran speech Wednesday, President Trump asserted much and argued for little. There were some boasts, some threats—“We are going to hit them extremely hard. . . . We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” And some of what appeared to be magical thinking: “When this conflict is […]
A memory from the Massapequa, N.Y., public schools of the late 1950s and early 1960s: We had regular desk drills. The school alarm would pierce the air and teachers would instruct us to slide from our chairs, crouch under our desks facing the floor, and place our hands, fingers interlocked, over our necks. This was […]