My mother was widely loved, and rightly so – and widely regarded as too sweet for words. Well, she had them buffaloed. Any woman who could out-stubborn a dachshund deserved to be accorded the wary...

In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the...

If T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan.At this moment, in the ragged middle of February,...

As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We’re not specially courageous, we’re just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a...

Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense...

Over the course of human history, many items have briefly flourished as means of exchange, only to be demonetarized. Now, we have demonetarized money.

After all, Christmastide is the time of year for warming brandies, for assertive burgundies and meaty Medoc wines, and for gladsome whiskies. And an Islay malt: well, this is the octave of St Andrew, and...

Regarding ‘Jabez’s Prayer’, I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian, and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many, and the least of them are the fleshlier ones: the...

As a general rule, I am opposed to tax dollars being used for – well, damn near anything, barring mail delivery, law enforcement, and heavy artillery.

I admit at the beginning that ‘popular religion,’ ‘demotic religion,’ the pieties of the common folk, tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, be it in syncretizing saints with old, half-forgotten pagan godlings, or...

Justice can readily do her job blindfolded; she cannot function gagged and deafened, least of all when the means of gagging and deafening her are not remarked.

Of all America’s natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible vein of irony.

For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians.

In answer to ‘But violence hasn’t solved anything!’The hell it hasn’t. The application of violence – of killing and a willingness to be killed – on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of...