At the end of his documentary series “The Civil War,” Ken Burns bids farewell to many of the figures who drove that story. They departed this earth in touching, even inspiring ways. There’s General Ulysses S. Grant, stricken with cancer, racing the Reaper to produce an autobiography and thereby provide for his family,
In the spring of 1519, the Aztec god-king Montezuma II received word that strange, marvelous creatures had appeared on his empire’s eastern shore. Fearing either to receive or destroy them, he sent envoys with orders to greet them, offer them gifts, and bid them leave the way they came. The emissaries went down
Former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, now governor of California, heard a still, small voice the other night. The voice said, “Gavin, the intentional killing of another person is wrong.” So His Excellency stepped forth the next day and announced he was taking steps to close every military installation in the state. Sorry,
Did you hear that Phil Robertson has a new book out? Yes, the “Duck Dynasty” patriarch, author of Happy Happy Happy, UnPHILtered, and (in a previous life) War and Peace, has just written The Theft of America’s Soul: Blowing the Lid Off the Lies That Are Destroying Our Country. You can tell by
Mean People Suck."I first saw that bumper-sticker slogan almost 20 years ago, pinned to the office bulletin board at the newspaper where I worked. It struck me as a little strange, much like what Jon Stewart called a “moment of zen.” Isn’t it mean to tell people they suck? Yet my progressive media colleagues
President Trump is down but not out,” says the headline in the New York Post. Beneath it, columnist Michael Goodwin writes that Trump is “battered, bruised and beaten,” his polls cratering, his presidency “at low tide,” and his enemies “riding high.” Worse than that, Trump’s failure to extract from those enemies any funding
Sister Souljah had a point. Younger readers may have some trouble figuring out who Sister Souljah was, or what her point might have been. We’ll get to that. For now, let’s just say that if Donald Trump were to gather a group of black leaders around him and say, “Sister Souljah had a
Americans these days are nothing if not angry, but are we angry at the right people? Consider the recent set-to between President Donald Trump and CNN’s designated Trump tormentor, Jim Acosta. The irrepressible Acosta was declaiming to the president that the caravan of Central Americans making its way through Mexico to the U.S.
One night in New York City, a young college student named Seth Barkas was accosted by two teenagers pretending to be panhandlers but actually intent on robbery. Their knives dealt him wounds from which he died a few days later. The crime and its aftermath hit Seth’s kid sister Janet hard: If I
The English language has its peculiarities. Two English words that appear to be opposites to one another can instead be synonyms. If someone is telling you something you don’t want to hear, you may find his “blunt” and his “pointed” comments equally galling. Conversely, a single word can have two opposite meanings. “Sensitive,”
