Breathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime (or lap dance), though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segr...
The amateur historian’s next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid.
Quoting Kipling, I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a god...
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opport...
When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.
To establish such a forthright dream of decency, who wouldn’t sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn’t among them?
Then Cotton quotes Luke 12:48. To whom much is given, of him God will require the more. Of course there’s a catch, Spider-Man. When God is the landlord, Cotton says, defraud him not of his rent. The p...
The scene of Washington cussing out Charles Lee was for some reason not included in the series of bronze illustrations of the Battle of Monmouth on the monument at the county courthouse. Even though i...
The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusi...
Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette is buried under dirt from Bunker Hill.
In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. . . No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of mourn together, suffer toge...
If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congression...
I revere the Bill of Rights, but at the same time I believe that anyone who's using three or more of them at a time is hogging them too much. (152)
Freedom of expression truly exists only when a society’s most repugnant nitwits are allowed to spew their nonsense in public.
Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists’ most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports,...
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kin...
At a Clinton press conference, I'm given the luxury of daydreaming, of being comfortable enough that he could find Peru on a map, say, that I don't have to hang on his every word, praying he won't fuc...
As recently as fifty years ago my grandmother was picking cotton with bleeding fingers. I think about her all the time while I'm getting overpaid to sit at a computer, eat Chinese takeout, and think u...
As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us.
A couple of days after the last time I saw him, I got a typically well-written postcard. He said that after he kissed me goodbye at LAX he was driving away and turned on the radio. Elvis was singing I...