Hal Crowther

Trading Lincoln's legacy for the Southern strategy

Staring "At -30-" square in the face

Her brand of commentary—intimate, indiscreet, defiantly regional, exuberantly scathing—does not survive her and will not be revisited in the corporatized, gadgetized, homogenized future of print journalism.

A legendary reporter, who took a crooked president's scalp and was once the torchbearer for every journalist who hoped to make a difference, has become, instead, a symbol of everything that's desperately wrong with the media culture in Washington, D.C.

Mile after mile, century upon century of monumental architecture, much of it in picturesque decay, recalls nothing so much as the pre-industrial Rome described by Keats and Shelley.

Some odd and justifiably obscure characters have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even the most wide-ranging international reader may puzzle over Verner von Heidenstam, Grazia Deledda or Franz Eemil Sillanpaa.

The Bush administration's contemptuous nomination of John Bolton to represent America before the world shows what happens when ignorant, arrogant people with no principles come to power.

A revolution of reason freed Prague 15 years ago--and the United States 228 years ago. Why are we moving in the opposite direction? Has any nation's intellectual history ever before run in reverse?

With the world watching anxiously, and often with horror, Americans have flailed and fumbled our way to the end of one of the most critical presidential campaigns in the nation's history. Apparently the strategy was to bury the electorate under such a landslide of irrelevancy, pseudodrama, mischief and misdirection that bewildered voters would slip into mental gridlock and obey some Pavlovian command as simple as a road sign.

When Ronald Reagan and Ray Charles died within a week of each other, there was a message scrawled on America's chalkboard for anyone who cared to read it. They were legendary entertainers; one was black, one was blind, one was of sound mind when he died and the other had spent 10 years staring into the shadows.