Last week in this space I was grossly unfair to a vast swathe of our country, one of America’s most hard-working and patriotic regions. In mocking the Midwest as humorless—indeed, affectless—I surely offended many thousands of my fellow citizens. And I did it without thinking, or ...

Someday I’d like to meet Monsieur Tourette, and ask him about his syndrome. Because over the years I’ve had close friends, colleagues, mentors, siblings and girlfriends suggest—sometimes quite tactfully—that I must suffer from this condition. Nothing else could explain why I ...

“Do you think you could turn the volume down on that war game you’re playing so I can least pretend that you’re listening to me?” So my beloved asked, very sweetly, in her slight Dallas twang. What could I say? “Why sure, Sweetie. Just a second…. Okay, what were ...

The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of fascist atrocities which provoked them. But with a ...

So there I was at the 21 Club, eating raw meat with The Gun Lady….    That was the best journalistic lede I ever wrote—and it never saw print. My editor at a second-tier business paper snipped it right out of the profile I’d done of a high-powered female gun rights ...

There’s nothing to shake your residual faith in journalists than to see a news report of an event in which you took part, or read a media account of yourself (especially a friendly one that unwittingly links you to the sort of person you’ve spent your life opposing). But a column by ...

And part of the picture is all you really see in Woods' analysis. He attributes the notion of sovereignty to an early modern advocate of royal absolutism. And perhaps he's right about the term. But I doubt that a Roman emperor would have had much trouble articulating his claim to arbitrary power ...

If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d never have met the woman I love…or needed to call in the Canadian Mounties to fend off a cyber-stalker who tried to steal my identity. Technology enabled me to spend several thousand bucks, over the years, on plane and train fare for dates with ...

What did I learn from 8.5 years of graduate school in Creative Writing and English? Apart from useful stuff like how to structure a commercial screenplay, I realized that literature departments are where bad ideas go to die. That’s what I read between the lines of Russell Jacoby’s ...

I’ve never been one for ruthless consistency. I learned young the fine art of emotional doublethink, from the experience of being at one and the same time:    An orthodox Catholic who mentally assented to official Church teaching on sexuality, according to its 1917 formulation ...