About Russell Baker: Russell Wayne Baker is an American writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (1982).
Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearl...
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.
Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandi...
A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.
You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.
It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.
Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
