Boy, I sure am glad I was never the 25-year-old repository for the hopes and dreams of an entire region of the country. What’s it like to be LeBron James? I have no idea. I’m just grateful that I was allowed my youthful missteps in private and that the only hoops I had to hit were the ...
Kyle Robbins’ first e-mail made me smile: “Can’t say I really saw this interaction coming,” he wrote. That makes two of us, Kyle. Last month, I spent a few days with students in the Media Fellows program at DePauw University, in Greencastle, Ind. They’re mostly ...
When it comes to memories you can’t pound out of your head with a mallet, few rival the staying power of that moment when we discover how babies are made. For me, it was really a series of excruciating epiphanies in the span of a fifth-grade afternoon in 1967. All of us girls marched down ...
As a columnist who isn’t Catholic, I used to feel that whatever happened in the Church was a whole lot of none of my business. It was as if I lacked standing and my status as a Protestant would call my motives into question. As Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan so aptly put it last ...
I look forward to the day when news organizations start to ban anonymous comments on their Web sites. Maybe that’s the foolish optimist in me, but I want to believe that we will finally admit—to ourselves and to the public at large—that allowing people to hide behind anonymity ...
As a culture, we’re wistful about our tallest buildings. Cities love to show off grand buildings as testaments to human endeavor. Illuminated skyscrapers are a region’s trophies, towering evidence of its greatness. For many, the drama of an illuminated and looming edifice rivals the ...
Last Tuesday, 60-year-old Robert A. Letcher showed up for a rally outside a congressional office in Columbus, Ohio, and decided he no longer could just stand there as an angry crowd screamed obscenities at him and fellow supporters of health care reform. So he grabbed hold of his walking stick ...
