Columns
May 30, 2019
Truth is a writer’s first responsibility. To conquer the lie, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said.
May 22, 2019
Maggie Whitfield interviews Melanie Newman of the Salem Red Sox…
April 22, 2019
It is hard to describe the loss of Notre Dame. When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived in Paris, each evening on his way home, he stopped as he crossed the Siene on the Île de la Cité to watch the sun set over Notre Dame. The darkening ancient towers silent against the new, awakening, electric […]
May 14, 2020
Making readers like me of George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin highly uncomfortable, a San Diego company has developed a technology to monitor social distance. Already in use in some places, it’s called Active Distance Alert and Monitoring, or ADAM, eerily, for short. The technology maps signals emitted by phones, so that crowded areas like grocery stores […]
October 31, 2020
Dwight Moody, the great revivalist, appreciated fire and brimstone. He knew nothing better, he said, than the notion “that Our Lord is coming again” to “take the men of this world out of their stocks and bonds.” As a preacher, he knew it worked, that it moved souls.
November 23, 2020
“Tell me,” Albert Camus’ Clamence asks, “doesn’t shame sting a little?”
January 23, 2021
Listen to B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” This time, really listen: his soulful singing, Lucille’s crying. They belie the lyrics.
April 1, 2021
A democracy fighting for its life, a body politic trying to survive: that’s what we’re seeing in Myanmar.