Mohammed Odeh al Rehaief. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright took the Flyer for a 12-second, sustained flight. Thirty-two years after that, the date was picked for the first official flight of the Douglas DC-3, the most legendary aircraft of the first century of powered flight. It is the first airplane on which I ever […]

The cotton wool hanging from the balcony is not a product of the vestiges of the Big Pink Holiday Party. Those would be purely mental, like what has happened to the interface between my protein-based processing unit and finger. It is a real enough meteorological phenomenon outside, a by-product of the warm moist air coming […]

I stopped to take a snapshot of the destruction at the White House yesterday. No, not that one, appealing as it might be to some folks. I am talking about the one in Buckingham. The minute I write about a building standing in “lonely isolation,” someone appears to take it as a direct challenge. The […]

It is curious to be in the work site in the dark. The days are too short now to have any time during the week to see it in the light. I peered out from the circle of white under the streetlight. There is a new featureless plain where the old garden apartments used to […]

I was only mildly surprised to see an OpEd in the paper this morning from the Director of National Intelligence. Back in the day, the Spooks did not normally avail themselves of the editorial page of the New York Times, which appears to have been in a death struggle with the Government about how we […]

Tommy, Up North in 1972 It was gray in the morning and gray through the day with a gray drizzle that melted the gray snow into forlorn patches of ice. I thought about the Christmas letter that I used to write. It would have been out the door and gone by now, produced in November; […]

Brian Sobel’s picture of Arizona’s armored mast on the Waipio Peninsula It is a day that I cannot remember, though my father and mother can. Every American one who was alive and could understand the words that issued from the radio knew exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard. Twenty-one […]

I am going to make this short and sweet, since there is white stuff in the air, and you know what that means here: madness. It is not that big a deal, not for stolid citizens of mid-western origin. But I have adapted to this swampy town, and now recoil in horror when the season […]

I’ll meet you at the slop chute on the old Whangpoo Bring along your dip net; there’ll be enough for two There’ll be beans and carrots and some Irish stew I’ll meet you at the slop chute on the old Whangpoo!     – Anthem of the “River Rats” of the Yangtze River Patrol, sung to the […]

I woke this morning from the running dream. I don’t know what your version of it might be. Mine normally starts in some perfectly ordinary social situation, as something vast begins to unfold. Sometimes it is a natural disaster presaging the release of terrible ogres; sometimes they are from the earth, and sometimes they are […]