That was the dullest Masters since Chip Beck threw in the towel to Bernhard Langer on the fifteenth fairway in 1997. And the more so since Saturday’s finish seemed so promising. Here was the leaderboard at the close of play…

One of those modern encounters: For the last two days, intermittently, we have heard a low, insistent, repeated “beep.” We had to ask our eight-year-old, Joe, to locate it for us, with his extremely sharp ears. The beep came from…

When I was a teenager, my mother belonged to a ladies’ auxiliary for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She hosted these august ladies at a coffee one afternoon, and I helped out. Mom had put out all her finery,…

I bought my first pipe when I was 16, in a downtown tobacco shop in Minneapolis, the kind of store that almost does not exist any more. A kindly old fellow with gray hair combed straight back on his head…

I have written about my grandmother many times, describing her as a fundamentalist Christian, the holder of what would be seen to be prejudices by modern lights, as an old fashioned talker (she said “extry” and “aig”). And I found…

When I was in grade school, a man from Egypt visited our church in Minneapolis. He got on stage in the parish hall and showed slides and talked about his country. He had skin of that nut brown shade common…

William F. Buckley became famous very young when he published his critical essay on Yale University, God and Man at Yale. That was 1951, a year after his graduation from Yale. His Yale years marked his life in other profound…

The Bluest State: How Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster by Jon Keller (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2007) Jon Keller has one of those gigs that frosts writers who have to turn out 20,000 words or…

In these parts, when we get the first snow forecast of the year, it comes like this. Three or four days in advance, the weather reporter says, “Friday evening a chance of snow, also a chance of some snow Saturday…

Ever since the Super Tuesday Republican primaries made it obvious and inevitable that the nominee would be Sen. John McCain, I have been struck dumb, so far as political commentary goes. What a disappointment. What a letdown. Yes, the GOP…