Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freez...
In other words, the most ardent republicans since the fall of Rome were asking their king to help them prevail over the representative legislature of the world’s oldest constitutional monarchy, the gr...
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...
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...
The amateur historian’s next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid.
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.
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...
Not that there wasn't still plenty of subduing to do here in North America. Even within our own limits, the savage still lights his death fires, to appease the wrath of an idol, he points out. What's...
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.
Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this Am...
Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont, had previously served France as both a male soldier in the Seven Years’ War and a female secret agent who infiltrated the Russian monarchy, successfully befriending and co...
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...
You think this is a mess? New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump! I'm not pretending the inside is any different from the outside anymore!
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...