Gang, some of you are going to crack on me hard for this, but I just took down the post from earlier today about the white kid being beat up on the bus by the black bullies. I used that...

In news from Alligator, the tiny Mississippi Delta hamlet has elected its first black mayor, Tomaso Brown, an Obama-inspired Pericles who ousted veteran Lord Mayor Robert Fava, an elderly area cracker who runs one of the town's only three busines...

The NYT has a link to the entire speech in which she made the comment about the "wise Latina" reaching a "better" verdict than "a white male who hasn't lived that life." I'm still a bit troubled by the remark,...

Writing in today's Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer, an Evangelical, foresees an imminent collapse of Evangelical Christianity in the US...

The current problems of Zoo New England, which runs Franklin Park Zoo in Dorchester and Stone Zoo in Stoneham, stem from Patrick's decision June 29 to veto $4 million in funding from the nonprofit's annual budget. That reduces the state appropriation...

Here's my farewell column from today's Dallas Morning News, about how our little Arts and Crafts bungalow helped shape our family's sensibilities. Excerpt: Thank goodness we ignored common advice to "buy the most house you can get for your money."...

An amazing story in today's Dallas Morning News! Really and truly amazing. Denise Brown is 84, and achieved distinction by founding the Dallas City Ballet. She was born in France, married a GI after the war, and moved to Texas. What she kept to...

Peter Steinfels, who has for 20 years written a fortnightly religion column for the NYTimes, announces in his most recent column that he's about to wrap things up. In this entry, he writes about somet of the consistent themes he's covered in the column...

This is what happens when the Saints go marching in. Sit back and commit the next 10 minutes to that superb piece of writing about what it's like to live in New Orleans now, with the Saints, for most of my life perennial losers, at 13-0 this season....

At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty, according to Weil, requires us "to give up our imaginary position as the center. ...A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our...