Two friends from different solar systems, a Manhattan litigator and a Kentucky novelist, sent me home-burned CDs that included the same song, “James River Blues” by the Old Crow Medicine Show. A boatman’s lament from the time when railroads replaced the packet boats on Virginia’s James River, it’s a sad song about the end of […]
Hal Crowther
Posted inNews
Bush’s cynical sacrifice of young livesand nothing else
The Bush administration is a cadaver decomposing on America’s doorstepyet no one will take responsibility for it, no one will give it a decent burial, no one even has the courage to step over it and try to get on with a nation’s decent business. This is the president who cannot be resuscitated and cannot […]
Posted inNews
That’s all she wrote: Remembering Molly Ivins
At the end of the film Venus, which stars Peter O’Toole as a decrepit actor holding off his final curtain, Vanessa Redgrave delivers a bleak line: “When you die, everyone wants to be your friend.” Though I knew Molly Ivins foreversince the Kennedy administrationI would never claim that I knew her well. If I implied […]
Posted inNews
3,003 … and counting
See also: Más Latinos, más muertes November 2006 was a month that historians will study in minute detail, day by day and headline by headline, when they attempt to reconstruct the iron chain of misery the United States has been forging for itself since September 2001though some will maintain that November 2000, with its still-disputed […]
Posted inNews
Prince George and the return of the Sheriff of Nottingham
The myth of Robin Hood–the outlaw who steals from the rich and gives to the poor (after deducting a modest commission)–is an ancient myth of universal appeal, one that must predate by many centuries the quasi-historical English bandit of the 12th century whose exploits were as familiar to my childhood as the miracles of Jesus […]
Posted inNews
Sympathy for the Devils?
In the sports pages of the nation’s newspapers, my home state of North Carolina is always well represented. In the news sections we rarely appear, unless some spectacular crime or criminal–Jeffrey McDonald, Velma Barfield, Eric Rudolph, Jim Bakker, Michael Peterson–momentarily captures the tabloid imagination. If the crime involves race, like the current Duke lacrosse case, […]
Posted inNews
Fatal balance: An Ice Age falls on the newsroom
I have a serious problem with Bob Woodward. As venal conglomerates, an indifferent public, a septic culture and a hostile government rapidly drain the lifeblood from a free press that was once the envy of the world’s democracies, it’s no time, I know, for journalists to turn cannibal. But this legendary reporter, who took a […]
Posted inNews
Big boats, little boats
HAVANA, Cuba–A first impression of this city is so indelible, a first reaction is colored with such wonder and surprise that you’re liable to describe it–ingenuously–as if yours were among the first Northern eyes to behold Havana. Mile after mile, century upon century of monumental architecture, much of it in picturesque decay, recalls nothing so […]
Posted inNews
Harold Pinter: No belief in happy endings
Some odd and justifiably obscure characters have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even the most wide-ranging international reader may puzzle over Verner von Heidenstam, Grazia Deledda or Franz Eemil Sillanpaa. Yet few recent winners were more deserving than the 103rd laureate, British playwright Harold Pinter, a venerable giant of the English theater whose plays […]
Posted inNews
Les bon temps (finissent)
READ MORE: “Had enough?” | “The human side of the war“ The priority now should be helping the victims and then figuring out how much of New Orleans’ magic can be saved. But two things are certain: George W. is up to his Tony Lamas in toxic sludge, and the federal government’s failures are testaments […]