Last week, in 1881, the Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops. He had been off the reservation, on the run for five years. Since the great victory on the Little Big Horn on the 25th of June, 1876. You will remember the Last Stand, though it didn’t happen that way, when the serenely […]

It’s the Ides of July, halfway through this month and a long ways to someplace else. I turned on the radio, up late and getting Vicki Barker of the World Service in mid-broadcast. Nobody was murdered in Iraq last night, at least no one of consequence. But she told me this morning that the troops […]

‘Easy reading is damned hard writing.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne Not that what I write is easy to read. I will leave that to the old dead white guys of the pantheon. It is the Fourth of July. It is a magic day in this slow-starting summer season. This feels more like Memorial Day than the […]

It is drizzly in town this morning, which is the way we could sum up the spring. It is not cool, but it is definitely not hot. This is almost the Fourth of July and we have had exactly two days that got into the nineties. Tom Cruise is 42 and Dave Barry is denying […]

It is gray here as the moisture from Tropical Depression Bill sweeps over the southeast corner of the United States. The folks on the radio are predicting an eighty percent chance of rain. I don’t want to go to work today. The Boss is back and the madness will begin all over again down at […]

Tropical Storm Bill, the second-named storm of the young season, waded ashore down in Louisiana yesterday. We got hourly updates on the progress of the storm surge on our Blackberry PDAs just in case we had to deploy the resources of the Department in response. Although I think that mission belongs to some other Department […]

I woke this morning from the running dream. You may know it. It is the one where a sea of adversaries of fantastic shape, both known and unknown oppose you and you flail at them, sometimes landing a good one but it doesn’t matter. The motion continues and the scenes roll on and at some […]

It is Saturday morning, the only time in the week to think about what is next, not that I obsess about it. It is just the only time when there is no work and no dread of what is coming tomorrow. Sort of like the old Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” I […]

On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin. While there he visited the Schoenburg town hall in the American Sector and uttered the words that framed the whole decade of Cold War, and presaged the robust commitment to democracy that became the adventure in Vietnam. He made his famous commitment to the […]