The Washington Monthly’s founding editor comes out of retirement to reprise his legendary column.
Tilting
Posted inMagazine, March/April/May 2016
Tilting at Windmills
Not a yooge difference As a Bronx native I’ve spent the campaign quietly weighing Donald Trump’s New York accent against that of Bernie Sanders. I can declare a split decision. Trump has the better vowels: His yooge obliterates Sanders’s yooge, the perfect measure of dismissiveness without dwelling on itself. But Sanders has the better consonants: […]
Posted inMagazine, November/December 2015
Jesters want the throne … Bureaucrats with jet packs … Just ask JFK
Jesters want the throne Forget about playing shadowy, Nixonian dirty tricks on one’s political opponents. This POTUS race is shaping up to be all about the public trolling—with bonus points awarded for daffiness. Exhibit A: After Marco Rubio got all sweaty in the endless CNN debate, Team Trump delivered a thoughtful care package to Rubio […]
Posted inMagazine, September/October 2015
Tilting at Windmills
Winning the angry-about-tuition vote Higher education is going to be one of the sleeper issues of the 2016 campaign season. The reason is that voters are furious at rising tuition, particularly at public colleges and universities, where most students go. Millennials—who overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and are a must-win demographic for […]
Posted inJune/July/August 2015, Magazine
Tilting at Windmills
Lost in the supermarket If you’re anything like me, you’re a basket case when it comes to filling your grocery basket. It’s not just the mind-bending options available (37 different varieties of Doritos); it’s also the vexing political and moral calculations. I’ve never gone in for those socially conscious mutual funds; I don’t really see […]
Posted inMagazine, March/April/May 2015
Tilting at Windmills
Four regulations and a funeral A few years ago, my wife became a funeral director. She has a special emphasis on “back to basics” funerals: simple caskets, avoiding embalming if possible, woodland burial, personal attention from the funeral director. She’d like to set up her own small funeral establishment some day, but she discovered a […]
Posted inBooks, Government, January/February 2015, Magazine
A Thief, a Dirty Politician, and a Suicide Bomber Walk Into a Bar …
Yes, terrorists conspire with criminal networks and corrupt officials. But that doesn’t mean cracking down on crime and corruption will stop terrorism.
Posted inJanuary/February 2015, Magazine
Tilting at Windmills
Frame of reverence If you went into homes up in the hollows of Charlie Peters’s West Virginia and elsewhere in the decades following World War II, you could often find photographs of FDR. The same was later true of JFK’s picture, and not just where Catholics lived. The people who hung them on their walls […]
Posted inMagazine, November/December 2014
Tilting at Windmills
Baseball Hall of Famer Henry Waxman Fall in Washington can be depressing, especially during a midterm election year. The chance of Congress achieving anything goes from slim to none, as the parties focus on campaigning. And the Washington Redskins’ megalomaniacal owner, Dan Snyder, reliably fields an underperforming team that kills off any excitement about the […]
Posted inMagazine, September/October 2014
Religious criminals belong in jail … Use Amazon to order an X47B … Nowhere to go by up
Fire Mary Barra Early last winter, the Justice Department fined Toyota $1.2 billion for failing to disclose a possible electronic defect that turned out not to exist. Shortly afterward, it became clear that General Motors had spent years covering up an all-too-real defect that, by the Reuters count, killed seventy-four people. If $1.2 billion was […]
