I love that feeling when a passage promises you that a story is worth sticking with. I had this experience recently when reading Wesley Morris’ profile of the late Cicely Tyson, who died last month at … Read more
Clichés are a bane of original writing. Unless you turn a worn and tired cliché on its ear (I sure hope you notice what I did just there) and make it new. Then all the meaning people attach to … Read more
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 of his retirement, effective Feb. 28, 2021, as … Read more
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 guiding line between right and wrong became fuzzy. Fed … Read more
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 to Die Young,” and featured … Read more
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 a question mark. Confusion ensues. Read more
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 published Nov. 4, 2020, about the mood of America on … Read more
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 stripe, grows from a foundation of selfless service to … Read more
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 overplanting with tobacco, half-brother to the plantation’s dissolute heir. Read more
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 moments of insight and clarity that prompt a silent … Read more
