So many fine memories and testimonials to the spirit of former President Jimmy Carter this past week. The entire nearly three-hour service and many individual clips can be viewed on You Tube from a number of sources. For my money, a touching eulogy from his good friend and foe, former President Gerald Ford, whom Carter vanquished in the 1976 election, may have topped the list.

Ford, of course, is now dead 19 years, but in a pact made between him and Carter long before, they agreed to write eulogies for each other’s funerals, with the survivor delivering the other man’s himself, and the first-deceased arranging for a family member (in this case, Ford’s son Steve) to do the honors of reading it into the record when the survivor finally met his end.

Two archrivals in a hard-fought contest for the most powerful position in the world, out of which came a mutually respectful, lifelong friendship, tinged with pla...

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” So begins the influential (and eerily prescient) 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which first appeared in “Harper’s” magazine (available here) and a year later led off historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of the same name.

In it, Hofstadter takes readers on a condensed but powerful tour (just over 16 book pages) through the landscape of an America roiling just beneath its veneer of civility and constitutional order. Irrational, extremist fears and delusions have always darkened those caverns of the nation’s psyche, most often (but not always) emanating from the right-wing, nativist end of the political spectrum.
He writes:

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind.”

That suspiciousness has charac...

Gathered a few of my very best friends around me these past days, the morning sun so far south we had to strain against the far northern side of my living room window to catch it piercing the pale winter light through the trees. Thought it unseemly, especially in this time of stout resolutions on the cusp of a new year, not to share some of their reflections with you…

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“Everything passes away—suffering pain blood hunger pestilence. The sword will pass away too but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why then will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?”
—From Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The White Guard” (1925)

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“The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.”
—From Rabindranath Tagore’s “Stray Birds” (1917)

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“Once I saw a fox, in an acre of cranberries, leaping and pounc...

“For she is the world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin. She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives. She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats its farrow. Thus she unites the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity...

It’s not every day that a journalist—particularly one as sober and unflamboyant as longtime economics professor and “New York Times” columnist Paul Krugman—has a song written in his honor. But then Loudon Wainwright, whose “deep ache of laughter” I’ve written about before in this space, is no everyday songwriter.

Wainwright’s musings on the human condition most often walk the razor’s edge between heartache and mirth, with “The Krugman Blues” angling decidedly toward the “mirth” end of that equation.

Not that Paul Krugman is big on mirth himself.

Which is part of the reason, no doubt, that Wainwright has so much fun with this song—and happily lets us in on the joke.

Which does nothing but make this pairing of Wainwright the jesting singer-songwriter and Krugman the restrained economist all the more amusing and ripe for dramatization…

Matter of plain fact: In the probably 15 years or so that I have bee...