One Great Moment

The retirement of newspaper editors is usually the stuff of insider industry news. Occasionally one breaks through to merit attention far more broadly.Martin Baron is one of those. The announcement…

Cal Hooper is a Chicago cop who was ditched by his wife, estranged from his daughter, haunted by past cases and addicted to the action. Somewhere along the way, the…

A line from a 1993 story about gun violence in America has stayed with me all these years. It was by DeNeen Brown of The Washington Post, called “Getting Ready…

Lou Abbott and Bud Costello’s most famous comedy sketch builds off a play on punctuation. Abbott names a baseball team’s infielders, and Who’s on first. Costello hears the period as…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Headlines on a story often change as the story is updated, or is published on different platforms. That apparently is what happened in a New York Times story…

Before you think this clause opens to a sentence and story about religion, because it leans on the word “parable,” it doesn’t — unless your embrace of religion, of whatever…

Hiram Walker is a motherless young slave in Virginia, fathered by the lord of a plantation that is clinging to shreds of grace even as the land plays out from…

As the daily read of crucial issues — racial injustice, the pandemic, the political divide, the battered environment, the brutal economy — expands and deepens, I keep looking for those…

It was the verb in this sentence in “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a reissued book of nature essays by Robin Wall Kimmerer, that captivated me. It’s a strong, active verb, so the sentence leaps where similar descriptions stroll. The…

In a work-related Zoom meeting recently, a colleague referred to Reddit as “lightning in a bottle.” I’m not entirely sure what that meant, despite her best efforts to explain it…