Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Those who remember Washington’s cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan’s intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva – alone,...

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

Anything that isn’t opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn’t matter.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there’s a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers’ own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

It is fitting that yesteryear’s swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today’s solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man’s pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.