Harvard’s produced an interesting week for those pushing for fossil-fuel free investments. On Monday, its president, Drew Gilpin Faust, posted a long email justifying the University’s positions and…
For 40 years, I’ve seen Enemies of Promise cited, quoted and (often, but not always) admired. I have finally bought a copy. Cyril Connolly wrote this memoir of growing…
How Dickensian was your boarding school? That this question, hotly debated between ages 13 and 18, persists in my peers’ seventh decade says much about their schools’ capacity…
I was going to observe John Cheever’s centenary with a brief post. Then, I saw in The Writer’s Almanac that Rachel Carson, too, was born on May 27, but in…
Monday evening, US Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) attempted to explain in a debate amongst Republican candidates for President why he’d said Osama bin Laden should have been captured and tried,…
Few events affected me as much, I’ve written, as Winston Churchill’s passing on January 24, 1965. Each year at this time, I find myself reflecting on Churchill. This year…
In ‘Why I Write’ (1946), George Orwell begins: From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be…