Flophouse is greater than the sum of its parts That is it is far more than a book of striking photographs of Bowery men and their surroundings with brief accompanying texts Because the four Bowery hotels described in the book are among the last of their kind in New York City the book has an ele

If you are like me, you resent having your name on everyone’s mailing list, receiving direct mail of all sorts, mostly junk, and sometimes having your dinner hour interrupted with telephone solicitations. The scrupulous among us, however, not wanting to miss out on that one, real, authentic of

Criminal justice is on the agenda of the U.S. bishops at their annual fall gathering in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13-16. They will be discussing the draft of a pastoral statement entitled Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice. Their comm

On Nov. 17, 1953, the secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, sent a letter to the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bernard Griffin. Graham Greene’s book THE POWER AND THE GLORY, it began, published in London in 1940 and afterwards translated into several languages, has be

One of the first words my 20-month-old son learned was show, as in his favorite, eternally recurring program Barney. That most of what he watches is similarly innocuous doesn’t relieve our discomfort as he points to the television every morning and demands, Show! Show! Not that we deny him his

Maine ModestyI read with interest Of Many Things (10/21), which mentions my native city and tells the story of a golden boy by the name of Ian Crocker. I recently heard another amazing story about this ordinary Olympian. It seems he was working before he left for Australia this summer and mentioned

Autumn is the most ambiguous of seasons. Throughout the centuries poets have used it as a symbol for either maturity or decay, much like a good news-bad news joke. But rather than wear oneself out trying to resolve this ambiguity, it seems wiser to submit to perplexity and agree with the 11th-centur

Scholars Say Vatican’s Published Material on Holocaust InadequateAfter a yearlong study, a commission of three Catholic and three Jewish scholars said that published Vatican material on World War II leaves unanswered many important questions about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. In a report m

When, in early August, I had to back out of a social engagement on Long Island because I was heading to Philadelphia to cover the Republican National Convention, neither my prospective host nor any would-be fellow guests were particularly impressed. In fact, some insinuated that there was a more nef

This year’s fall TV roundup was surprisingly simple to, well, round up, since there have been relatively few good shows introduced this season. And after all, does it take a media savant to predict that one is probably not going to enjoy a show called Freakylinks? Or that a show called Cursed