Summer of 1969, a Memoir: Part 1, Why Don’t We Sing This Song All Together

John “Jack” Niflot (Gift of Duke Devlin)/The Museum at Bethel Woods/Via Reuters

Ann-Margaret was dancing down the middle of Sepulveda Boulevard. We were watching her from an overpass above. We were 17 and 19, and we had just walked out of Los Angeles International Airport. We had worked the first part of the summer to afford this first ever trip on our own — a three-week odyssey up […]

Unexceptional America

In the aftermath of the alarm-raising dud that were the Mueller congressional hearings, some observations are in order. We need to see clearly where the nation stands. The first misfortune in post-election resistance to Trump was a GOP congress during the first two years. Unlike Watergate, the developing, synergistic drama of an ongoing special counsel […]

The Necessary, Honorable Thing: Denounce Trump

Only a few true moments of conscience present themselves in a lifetime. For relatively safe and comfortable Americans of the post-World War II era — a place and period of human history unparalleled in its general security and complacency — those moments are even fewer. So unfamiliar are these crucibles of conscience in actual experience that […]

The Firing of Melissa Click

This is where the faculty case against firing Melissa Click, otherwise correct in every respect, falls apart: But no one on the campus filed a complaint against the professor, Ms. Henrickson said, a step that would have triggered the university’s own procedures. “No one took the opportunity to avail themselves of that process,” she said, […]

The Causes of ISIS

Establishing what caused ISIS has become, for many, something of a cause. I have not researched exactly when the debate began – what was, as it were, the cause of the debate over the cause of ISIS – but certainly soon after its sweep from Syria into Iraq began, and unsurprisingly if even earlier, people […]