Patrick O'Hannigan
When Paul Chesser turned a spotlight on “Blueprint NC” in this space last month, he did his homework, which is more than can be said for some of the local columnists now arguing about whether Reverend William Barber II, the…
American astronomer J. Allen Hynek shuffled off this mortal coil in 1986, but I wonder what he would have made of this week’s State of the Union address, which as far as I can tell vindicated a good bit of…
The golden thread running through Spectator articles about this year’s March for Life deserves a mention of its own, if only so that an ever-widening circle of people can be heartened by the optimism so evident at the event itself….
My son takes a bus to school, but my daughter does not, and the carpool lane where she and I pass several minutes every weekday morning creeping past traffic cones to whichever teacher has Door Duty at the school entrance…
I never got his name, but the man in the black balaclava was a merry companion as the two of us walked several blocks of Constitution Avenue chatting and chanting last Friday afternoon. We had come separately to the March…
Big-time American opinion makers have again been exposed as the sentimentalists that so many of them are. Their coddling of our current president does not even rise to the level of the backhanded compliment by which George Bailey was accused…
Suzanne Collins bottled lightning in writing her Hunger Games trilogy. Now that reviewers beyond the work’s original young adult demographic have greeted the new movie based on the first book of that trilogy with varying degrees of enthusiasm, we who care…
The deliberately vague language of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 that cited newly elected President Barack Obama for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” was notable for having confused words with deeds, but it has…
Election 2012 is shaping up as a Catch-22 for Republicans. Its outcome depends on whether “more of the same” can out-point “new and improved,” but those labels do not always adhere to incumbents and challengers in predictable ways, which is…
The only Native American writer I know gave permission for a literary journal to republish thoughts about Thanksgiving that she had first corralled a few years ago, and reading them was an illuminating experience. Terra Trevor reminded me why American…
