“Let’s stop worrying about people’s rights.” Sadly there are dozens of junctures in American history from which that shameful quote might spring. It could date as far back as 1798 when President Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, making it illegal to criticize the U.S. government. It could come from the 1870s when Southern […]

“I believe the light that shines on you will shine on you forever … though I can’t guarantee there’s nothing scary hiding under your bed.” — “Father and Daughter” by Paul Simon. My wife has a bad knee and isn’t much for long walks, so that night after the Chunnel train had brought us over […]

“You were my little red-headed girl.” I lean over and whisper this as, on the screen above us, “The Peanuts Movie” is playing. Poor Charlie Brown, too crippled by shyness and insecurity to croak out a greeting to the flame-haired object of his affection, is stumbling through various schemes to win her attention. My wife […]

It was the kind of a statistic that would have left a sane country stunned and shamed. This country barely noticed it. It came last month, courtesy of The Washington Post, which reported that, as of mid-October, toddlers in America have been shooting people this year at a rate of one a week. You know […]

It had nothing to do with race. So said Sheriff Leon Lott, last week, in discussing a violent arrest by one of his officers, a white deputy named Ben Fields, of a black female student at Spring Valley High in Richland County, S.C. Fields, a school resource officer, was called in when the girl reportedly […]

So maybe experience is not all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, if experience were really the teacher the axiom claims, the state of Florida would not be threatening to lumber down the same thorny path from which Indiana and Arkansas so recently retreated in humiliation. Both those states, you will recall, attempted to […]