Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.
But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their...
Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
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...
Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
The neighborhood of Gramercy Park, where Edwin used to live, was built to look like London, which is to say that its considerable beauty is skin deep while its heart beats with the ugliness of monarch...
The last line of Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is addressed to the American people and their congressmen. As they deal with me and my people, kindly, generously, and justly, so may the Great Ruler...
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
I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race.
I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I th...
Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that Nov...
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...
By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling...
Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free?
After he finishes his song, I ask him, Sir, were you just playing ‘Lean on Me’? That’s right! he answers, thrilled. Now, whenever I think of Mudd and his house I hear that song, hear Mudd serenading t...
Did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence—applied