Cloak Yourself in Lies and Selfishness
I feel something of an obligation to acknowledge up front that I hated Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris’s…
Naked X-Rays at BWI
First they came to Phoenix. Then they came to New York and Los Angeles. Now they’ve come to Baltimore. Homeland Security Secretary…
Dunmore’s Proclamation to Virginia
On November 15, 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation setting “all indentured…
From the Bridge of San Francisco to the Shores of Mangalore
Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Cities. We begin our journey here in the United States, where CatSynth shows us some photos…
A Court of Tar and Feathers at Colonial Williamsburg
Margaret Thatcher notes in her excellent book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World: America is more than a nation or a state…
Dramatic Irony
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, click here. Reading Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, the story of her childhood battle…
Blogger Protection Act of 2008
Two years after liberal Republican John McCain teamed up with liberal Democrat Russ Feingold to eviserate the First Amendment, a federal court…
A Precise Mind
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, click here. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son is in many places marked by…
Art and Science on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Last week I enjoyed a kind of homecoming as I played tourist in my adopted home city of Washington, D.C. I started…
NIGHT, by Elie Weisel: An Intellectual’s Despair
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, click here. Elie Wiesel’s Night is an account of shocking horror and how it can…
Charlton Heston, A Personal Note
The world lost a class actor this weekend with the passing of Charlton Heston. Charlton Heston was a great actor, a gracious…
A Grief Autopsied
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of the months following her husband’s sudden death, is part grief journal, part literature…