columns

One of the unwritten but widely respected rules of satire is that somehow, somewhere, someone simply isn’t going to get the joke. And if they don’t ge...

WASHINGTON — “A Dupont Circle neighbor said he seemed ‘more like a nerd than a spy.’” “The rabbi of the South Bend, Ind., temple where he was bar mitz...

WASHINGTON — H.L. Mencken gets a workout in election years when voters are reminded by pundits of the curmudgeon’s observation that no one ever went b...

WASHINGTON — Part of this year’s Lenten discipline for many religious people has been to see two bad religious movies, “Noah” and “God’s Not Dead.” Bo...

Maybe we were just focused on the wrong body part. Ever since Tiger Woods’ SUV veered off course at the end of his driveway in Florida nearly six year...

WASHINGTON — The capital’s dysfunction has its unfortunate exceptions. Gridlock yields to interests powerful enough to trump habits of obstruction. Th...

WASHINGTON — “Andre Dawson,” Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully once said, “has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. Aren’t we all?” Yes, so use so...

Talk about a flashback. When ESPN revealed late last week that St. Bonaventure’s Mark Schmidt had met with Boston College about the Eagles’ open men’s...

WASHINGTON — The past couple of weeks have marked a turning point in American ugliness as the mob has turned its full fury on first lady Michelle Obam...

College basketball is one of my favorite sports along with baseball, cricket, curling, walnut cracking, bog snorkeling, toe wrestling and Finnish wife...

From the beginning, his name, naturally, had been linked one way or another to the job. A week-and-a-half ago, Boston College fired its coach, former ...

WASHINGTON — Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, said of Poland, perilously positioned between Russia and Germany: “If you pitch your tent in the m...

WASHINGTON — In the context of talking about limits on free speech, it’s common to say that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins....

WASHINGTON — When it comes to tackling complicated legal issues, one would be hard-pressed to conjure a less likely partnership than Harvard law profe...

WASHINGTON — History is like a teacher, except armed with truncheons and guns. So what are its recent lessons? In the early 1990s, Ukraine briefly pos...

It’s not a surprise when a 95-year-old dies. After all, only a tenth of one percent of the population of this country reaches that age. And, the reali...

WASHINGTON — Critics of Rep. Paul Ryan’s remarks about cultural factors in the persistence of poverty are simultaneously shrill and boring. Their pred...

Alas, poor Paul Ryan. I take the House Budget chairman at his word that he did not intend to offend African Americans with his statements about how th...

WASHINGTON — Of all the signs of Democratic midterm trouble, it is fitting that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius — who has alr...

WASHINGTON — Rand Paul is the most intriguing — and for Democrats, perhaps the most frightening — figure in today’s Republican Party. The Kentucky sen...