Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the blog in November 2006: 'I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy'. I opposed the mili...
The streak of bleach in my hair is as obvious as ever. Am I really going out in public like this? I push my hair backward and forward a few times - but I can't hide it. Maybe I could walk along with my hand carelessly positioned at my head, as if I'm...
Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural ca...
The ten billion animals that are killed every year for meat and the virulent consequences of contemporary animal agricultural practices remain conspicuously absent from public discourse. How often have you seen media exposés on the violent treatment...
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, s...
In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You do...
La recherche d'une réalité communautaire prend la forme d'une opération de sauvetage massive. J'estime que c'est la grande aventure de notre temps, infiniment plus valable pour l'homme que la conquête de l'espace. Elle représente le retour et le...
Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote w...
Joseph Goebbels: [in German; subtitled] How many seats in your auditorium? Francesca Mondino: [translates into French] Shosanna Dreyfus: [in French; subtitled] Three hundred and fifty. Francesca Mondino: [translates into German] Joseph Goebbels: That...
[last lines] Tony Stark: There's been speculation that I was involved in the events that occurred on the freeway and the rooftop... Christine Everheart: I'm sorry, Mr. Stark, but do you honestly expect us to believe that that was a bodyguard in a sui...
John Anderton: [about Witwer's father] What does he think about your chosen line of work? Danny Witwer: I don't know. He was shot and killed when I was 15 on the steps of our church in Dublin. I know what it's like to lose someone close, John. 'Cours...
Pomade Vendor: I can get the part from Bristol. It'll take two weeks, here's your pomade. Ulysses Everett McGill: Two weeks? That don't do me no good. Pomade Vendor: Nearest Ford auto man's Bristol. Ulysses Everett McGill: Hold on, I don't want this ...
Gordon Gekko: The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and wha...
Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, im...
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and s...
Carpe Diem By Edna Stewart Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman did it, why can't I? The words of Horace, his laconic phrase. Does it amuse me or frighten me? Does it rub salt in an old wound? Horace, Shakespeare, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman my ...
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth o...
I don't need a mate,” she muttered, staring up at the bright circle of the early autumn moon. “But can't you send me a nice, sexy, strongmale to dance with? Pretty please?” She hadn't had a lover for close to eight months now, and it was starti...
And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be 'See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't....
I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. L...
We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very imma...
