Opinion
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September 9-16, 2013
On May 28, 2013, the perfect human being was born in Philadelphia.
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September 9-16, 2013
The distance from Stone Mountain, Ga., to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta is approximately 15 miles, or about 150 years. If you’re ever in that neck of the woods, as I was this summer, I suggest that you see both sites on the same day. For one thing, the road between them meanders through some lovely country, the sort of hazy, idyllic charm a New Englander like me expects to find during August in the Deep South.
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September 9-16, 2013
Railroads are the devil’s work!
Not really, I suppose. I might have thought that earlier this summer when my commuter train was thrown off schedule for weeks by a derailed trash train at my station, itself aptly named Spuyten Duyvil, which Washington Irving claimed was a corruption of the Dutch phrase “in spite of the Devil.” But I see that train as more or less morally neutral but economically advantageous, if recently a bit smelly. Also, I can sleep on it....
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September 9-16, 2013
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September 9-16, 2013
Cheating has always been a part of baseball. Whether players corked their bats, smeared Vaseline on their caps or stole signs from the catcher, the game has never been entirely free of a certain sly trickery. So why should we greet the news of the proposed suspension of Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees for use of performance-enhancing drugs with more than a shrug of the shoulders? Players cheat and sometimes get caught. That is just part of the game...
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August 26-September 2, 2013
North African migrants seeking refuge in Italy face a perilous journey across Mediterranean waters. In the past two decades some 6,000 have perished at sea en route to Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia. Pope Francis, in his first trip outside Rome as pope, visited Lampedusa on July 8 and dropped a wreath of flowers into the Mediterranean as a sign of mourning.
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August 26-September 2, 2013
For me, the tipping point in my awareness of the crisis facing women religious came by way of Twitter and a phone call.
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August 26-September 2, 2013
Japan’s Witness
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is drawing international praise for his innovative policies aimed at reviving Japan’s somnolent economy. In July he received a crucial boost from Japan’s voters, who helped put his coalition in firm control of the country’s legislature. Mr. Abe now has the political muscle he needs to complete his economic program, but his nationalist ambitions are causing some concern...
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August 26-September 2, 2013
Wellfleet’s outer beach is just about an hour’s drive from my boyhood home on Cape Cod. The spot is well known for a steep, 50-foot sand cliff that rises behind it, topped by a gently sloping upland that affords a graceful vista of the Atlantic, exactly the sort of spot that prompted Henry David Thoreau to say of Cape Cod that “a man may stand there and put all of America behind him.” There may be a craggy point or two in Maine that’s technically farther...
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August 26-September 2, 2013
Everyone expected a short homily—and we got it. My childhood priest knew the Mass needed to finish on time since everyone was about to rush to the next liturgical rite: game day in Green Bay, Wis. Growing up 20 miles south of Titletown, U.S.A., the nickname for the city of 104,000 whose famous football team boasts 13 National Football League titles, I lived for football Sundays.