The author would be 90 years old today.
Of Other Things
The Sounds I Live By
I like traditional radio because it’s tied to a person but also because it’s tied to a place.
Full Immersion Therapy
It’s spring break time; do you know where your college age children are? If they attend a Catholic college, there’s a decent chance they’re among the thousands of students who are spending it on an immersion trip to any number of communities in need around the globe.Over the next f
Examining our social sins
A Lenten reflection on the collective sins of racism, violence and environmental destruction.
Ashes Mark the Frontier
Ash Wednesday’s marked foreheads represent far more than personal piety.
A Poet’s Corner
‘There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” These famous words of Thomas Merton convey the vision he experienced standing on a street corner in Louisville, Ky., on March 18, 1958. It was 10 years and nine months before his untimely death, bu
Hip-Hop, My First Love
I remember the first time I heard Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues,” a song about winning and losing in life. I was 10 years old, attempting to explain the lyrics to my father. Sitting across from me in the kitchen of our old apartment, his acoustic guitar across his lap, my father respo
A Requiem for Truthiness
As the self-proclaimed “pope of basic cable,” Colbert performed a brilliant high-wire act.
Love and Death in New Jersey
Richard Ford has never written a frivolous word. So the title of his latest four related novellas, Let Me Be Frank With You (Harper Collins), should not be dismissed. It is the fourth of the Frank Bascombe series, about a sportswriter turned real estate agent. Beginning with The Sportswriter (1986),
A Common Core–of Hysteria?
It has been mocked by David Letterman and Steven Colbert. On Twitter, the comedian Louis C. K. complains that his kids used to love math, but now “it makes them cry.” Tea Party conservatives have pummeled it as another menacing tentacle of a vast left-wing conspiracy to “big-brothe
