People aren’t doing it for the free doughnuts. But they might do it for America. — The great patriotic holiday of July 4 came and went, and so did the brief hullabaloo in the press over our failure to hit Joe Biden’s deadline for getting at least one COVID shot into the arms of 70% of U.S. adults. The president made a speech promising to go…

Wanna-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy fails at partisanship, while his party picks a Democrat in Pennsylvania — For the past hundred years, the vote for the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has been uneventful, like filling out the customs form upon your return from a trip abroad. …

The quiet stretch bookended by Christmas and New Year’s is perfect for thinking about what comes next — The mad rush of Christmas is behind us. The new year is yet to arrive. For me, the days in-between are one of the best parts of the year. For one thing, the ad agency where I work shuts down. We’re all too distracted to be truly productive in our…

T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece turns 100 years old this year, and is still filled with inspiration for writers — I had a fever the first time I read The Waste Land. Maybe that explains the way the words burned themselves so indelibly into my life. I was a young copywriter at a hot ad agency, and I’d landed a dream assignment. A new ad campaign for Harley-Davidson motorcycles would…

A modest suggestion for those who mistrust Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter but aren’t ready to deplatform — It’s possible that by the time you read this, Twitter will have completed its self-destruction under the erratic ownership of Elon Musk. In that case, you can disregard the following. My guess is Twitter will be with us still. Not quite yet the “free-for-all-hellscape” Mr. Musk promised to steer clear…

The most beautiful of seasons is also the most fleeting — I took my mother for a drive on a splendid fall day. At 93 years old she’s suddenly found herself looking at a new chapter in her life, and here she thought she’d already authored all the chapters that might be required for a compelling life’s story. She needed cheering…

The lesson of Liz Truss is that trusting right-wing politicians to fix inflation is like pouring gas on a dumpster fire — So, British Prime Minister Liz Truss is out, resigning after a wild 44 days and setting a record for brevity in the office. …

The problem isn’t the way conservatives think, it’s that they seem to have given up on thinking at all — There was a small kerfuffle in my home state of Minnesota recently when Scott Jensen, the Republican candidate running for governor, was caught on film complaining to supporters that there are litter boxes in the state’s classrooms so kids who identify as cats have a place to pee. You know…

War, pestilence, a haywire climate, political hogwash; the whole dizzying vortex of things plaguing us is a message in itself — I’m not an economist or political scientist or even all that smart on any given day, just a guy with two ears connected by a functioning brain. …