First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it’s fun to look back on this dilemma of to-colu...
David, you don't want to get rid of the cracks and the crevices in the building because that's where the ghosts hide. And if you get rid of the ghosts, the Chelsea will just be any other building.
After Dickinson and Adams had it out over the Olive Branch Petition, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that he and Dickinson are not to be on speaking terms. How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheer...
Mania for exact change can be off-putting for a traveler, what with getting yelled at by cashiers and cab drivers all day long for the crime of paying a sixteen-euro fare with a twenty-euro note. She...
With a century and change between the 1880 convention and now, I’ll admit I rolled my eyes at the ideological hairsplitting, wondering how a group of people who more or less agreed with one another ab...
This is a sappy way to put it, but the Winthrop who warns Williams is the Winthrop I fell in love with, the Winthrop Cotton Mather celebrates for sharing his firewood with the needy, the Winthrop who...
The doo-wop stalker love song on a Cincinnati oldies station--you broke up with me because I was an obnoxious jerk and now you're dating him, so I drive by your house and stare in your window every ni...
One night, he left Stephen and me in the arcade and rushed off to a – this hurt my feelings – real game. That night, he missed a foul shot by two feet and made the mistake of admitting to the other pl...
If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.
His boss, Isaac (Robert Guillaume), agrees but tells him to do it anyway because it’s television and this is how it’s done. Dan replies, Yeah, well, sitting in the back of the bus was how it was done...
But truth be told, I'm not as dour-looking as I would like. I'm stuck with this round, sweetie-pie face, tiny heart-shaped lips, the daintiest dimples, and apple cheeks so rosy I appear in a perpetual...
A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.
I soon figured out that I should keep my qualms to myself. Christianity is no different from any other cult---it isn't about faith. It's about agreement, about like-minded people sitting together in t...
On the illusive Monsieur Hortalez. When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the tim...
Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night’s subject for criticism was th...
Lincoln, of course, was giggling at the moment of impact; Booth knowing the play Lincoln was watching by heart, chose a laugh Lin on purpose to dampen the noise of his Derringer's report.
He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.
For years they’ve grumbled that England is a cesspool governed by an immoral king under the spell of the Whore of Babylon, which is their cute nickname for the pope.
Experience is terribly important. You’ll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, ‘Oh, it’s Washington cyn...