I once awoke from a dream while crossing Bond Street in New York with a friend, and it was snowing hard. We had been talking, and there had been no…

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The entrance to Castle Garden was blocked up with vehicles, peddlers of cheap cigars, apple stands, and runners from the boarding houses and intelligence offices that abound in the neighborhood…

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“I have just had a gratifying illustration of the conscientious perfection of the American people in enacting and enforcing a law when they are agreed that it is really for…

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Wise heads tell us we act first, or decide to act first, and reason afterward. What could be put down in black and white as to why we took up…

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I’ve given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensible proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness. I have rubbed…

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We have perhaps created too much history too quickly—more than we can cope with. We know the cycles: birth, growth, glory, degeneration. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first…

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Shea Stadium is not Eden, and the picture of Tom and Nancy Seaver leaving its graceless precincts in tears did not immediately remind me of the Expulsion of Adam and…

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All over the world thousands upon thousands of men and women pass their whole lives denouncing, instructing, commanding, cajoling, imploring their fellows. With what results? One finds it rather hard…

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The Hemlock Quarterly, an unassuming little newsletter that until recently was the chief perquisite of membership in the Hemlock Society, may have been the only radical publication in the United…

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The notion of the “nostalgic American” served liberals as an ideal whipping boy at a time when the intellectual foundations of liberalism were beginning to erode. As the dogma of…

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Once again, the budgets of the agencies that support the arts are to be cut. Meanwhile, costs in the arts are going up. But one continues to read and hear…

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Among those people in New York who care about newspapers and who like to think of their content as something more than amusement, it has become increasingly difficult to find…

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Atlanta in ruins. Originally published in the October 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine…

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I can’t remember exactly when the cinematic past became palpable for me. It was probably sometime in the late Fifties or early Sixties, when the mix of television screenings, museum…

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There is a large and historical callous on my right middle finger that marks how seriously I have taken the political demise of Richard Nixon. The protrusion is occasioned by…

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Because I must, I accept that there are people who don’t care too much about those they bump into on the journey. They just want to enjoy a beer or…

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It would be a bold writer who would attempt to have the last word on the much-­debated maternal instinct. But since so many men have had their say on the…

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I never wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School,…

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Learning to Go to Sea on Shore, by George Wright. Originally published in the November 1918 issue of Harper’s Magazine It is a small hotel compared with the fashionable resorts…

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Revolver shots at three in the morning. As I stuck my head out the window, lights flared up and down the darkened block. More heads craned from open windows. Below…

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People in Chicago will tell you that there is a happy land not far away. Sitting on the ash heap of their own miseries, they mournfully explain that just over…

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Fear is an old emotion, laid down deep in the nervous system. Without its promptings no species of animal life could have survived and civilization could not have developed. Certainly…

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In April, an epidemic of influenza exploded in the Far East. Starting in Hong Kong, it spread thousands of miles in all directions in less than two months. As we…

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During the Dayton trial there was much discussion about what had happened to William Jennings Bryan. How had a progressive democrat become so illiberal? How did it happen that the…

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The genuine sportsman’s voice is seldom heard in the outcry against gun-control laws. The dominant note is the shrill voice of the superpatriot. His sentiments were once well synthesized by…

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It was the foggy end of a drizzly day. Along the lunch counter of the Ferry Dock Tavern, gray-haired men in overalls and leather jackets were eating oyster stew. A…

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In tracing the pedigree of the American conservative movement we must note that from, say, 1935 to 1955 (from the rise of Father Coughlin to the demise of Joseph McCarthy),…

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Just over an hour after he had been threatened with assassinationin Sacramento, President Ford spoke about the troubling rise in crime in the United States. The little of his remarks…

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