Here in a few weeks my company is taking all the employees to a Colorado Rockies game. All of us except me, that is – I’ll be begging off for reasons that I feel like I’ve hashed through a million times. I will no doubt be afforded several more chances to explain why I refuse to patronize the Rox as
Read morePulitzer- and Emmy-winner William Henry‘s famous polemic, In Defense of Elitism (1994), argues that societies can be ranked along a spectrum with “egalitarianism” on one end and “elitism” on the other. He concludes that America, to its detriment, has slid too far in the direction of egalitarianism, and in the process that it has abandoned the elitist impulse that made
Read moreI try to avoid getting teary-eyed about This Great Land in Which We Live. We all know the United States has tremendous shortcomings, and it seems like our every success only reminds us of ten more problems which have not been adequately addressed. Tonight, though, we saw a remarkable moment, and for a few seconds between innings at Shea Stadium
Read moreElvis was not a phenomenon. He was not a craze. He was not even, or at least not only, a singer, or an artist. He was that perfect American symbol, fundamentally a mystery, and the idea was that he would outlive us all – or live for as long as it took both him and his audience to reach the
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lullaby pit 