Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it's s...
To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic informative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free.
The best part about being a nerd within a community of nerds is the insularity – it’s cozy, familial, come as you are. In a discussion board on the Web site Slashdot.org about Rushmore, a film with a...
That's what we Americans do when we find a place that's really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.
That story is proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.
Standing there at Powell’s grave, telling my nephew about a buried skull, I realize how much of our relationship revolves around body parts and severed heads. Once Owen learned to walk, we started pla...
Sir, I said, except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders...
Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder. That
It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word phase. As if any minute, we would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to our senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken s...
In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.
History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his p...
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.
After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which...
And thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man’...
When Lafayette visited Monticello in 1824, his old friend Thomas Jefferson toasted him: When I was stationed in his country for the purpose of cementing its friendship with ours, and of advancing our...
We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the r...
We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.