Category Politics/Culture

Since almost from the beginning of recorded time, humankind has wedded itself to the notion of progress in all things. We need look no further than the experience of our own growth in stature cutting across every facet of our lives: the larger and stronger brains and bodies of maturity paving the way for our ever greater competence, confidence, creativity and life satisfaction.

Until, that is, our inevitable decline.

But that’s when our successors come to the rescue, extending our influence, keeping us alive in some figurative sense, each new generation building on the last and becoming even larger, stronger, faster, smarter, the sum total of human knowledge and history keeping us on a constant trajectory of expansion and progress.

The same principle applies on the individual psychological-spiritual level as well, in the arc of personal histories that we like to think move us steadily toward more wholeness...

With friends and intimates, we continue to talk of many things as we go about our daily lives. But those lives don’t feel quite the same as they did just two weeks ago, because our world no longer feels the same.

Barely under the surface of most every interaction, every move hither and yon tending to errands, exercise, shopping excursions and, poetically a couple of mornings ago, our first view of a newborn gifted by posterity to young friends, there looms the specter, the worry, the hope, for some sliver of good news from the battle unto death the Ukrainian people are currently waging against the Putin invaders.

It is a battle, make no mistake, that they are waging on behalf of us all.

Perhaps it is our own vulnerability, among other factors, that seems to be weighing most on us as we tiptoe toward a spring that may be delayed severely for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, or perhaps never experienced a...

No bombs fell in downtown Durham yesterday. No rockets slammed into City Hall or its police station. Most of us here, and I assume pretty much the same about you, went about our appointed tasks and pleasures, tending to jobs, walking dogs, meeting someone for coffee, picking up kids or grandkids from school, getting a hearty something out on the dinner table to feed body and soul.

The basic stuff of life, which we often take for granted and then look back on as its best, most memorable and enduring pieces that we take to our graves with a gladdened heart.

That said, my day was only partially like that, because a good part of it was spent obsessing about the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian dictator and war criminal Vladimir Putin.

I couldn’t do enough reading and watching and listening to slake my thirst for absorbing the full impact of this momentous and horrid event, potentially the most consequential ...

I’ve never quite cottoned to people who can’t bring themselves to insert a joke, a hint of irreverence, a witty aside or a slightly jaundiced observation into their writing or conversation. Oh, I can respect and work alongside and even benefit in one way or other from knowing them. They’re not bad people.

But a severe humor deficit, a flattened, sparkless demeanor, as if a person has just emerged back up to ground level after a double shift in the coal mine and now has to walk three miles home in a steady drizzle, has always struck me as lacking too much of the animating life force that completes us as human beings and, in a powerful sense, helps at least somewhat to make the all-too-common tragedy and anguish of life bearable.

And as P.J. O’Rourke, the conservative gadfly, satirist, former “National Lampoon” editor, “”Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” radio show panelist and all-around droll wit pointed ...

Roger Craig was an avuncular figure in the sometimes rough-and-tumble, sometimes over-sentimentalized world of major league baseball. He was a better-than-his-record starting pitcher mid-20th century, enjoying a 12-year career and four World Series appearances before staying in the game first as a scout and coach and then through a successful decade-long run as a manager.

It was during his eight-season run (1985-92) managing the San Francisco Giants in that cosmopolitan city that the slightly drawling Durham, North Carolina native became known and celebrated for a down-home phrase to keep his players’ spirits up, especially when they were leaving the clubhouse after a tough loss, or worse, several losses in a row.

“Don’t let your daubers down,” he would tell them, employing that delightful, if somewhat mysterious-origin word “daubers” to here mean their spirits, confidence and passion for the game.

One ne...