I could have sworn I'd already read "Hub Fan Bids Kid Adieu," John Updike's classic essay on Ted Williams' final game. Every serious, literate baseball fan has. But when I went through it this week, in the wake of Updike's death, I realized that simply could not be: it was...

I'd wanted to meet Caroline Kennedy -- or, really, not meet her necessarily, but just to be in her presence, to sit across the table from her and look at her. It wasn't a good reason to do a story, but no one was asking and it looked legit: it...

The blogs in Boston are filled with the usual teeth-gnashing now that the Yankees have snatched another free agent out from under the Red Sox. Once again, Theo Epstein and John Henry, the team's general manager and principal owner, are the Harry Truman and Dean Acheson of the drama, the...

Speaking up for the Electoral College is a bit like defending the English system of measurements. Like inches and gallons, electoral votes are supposedly one of those boneheaded legacies of days passed that can't be justified, or fixed. Every four years, there are calls to scrap the whole thing,...

This past Sunday, while Ralph Nader unveiled his deja-vu candidacy on Meet the Press, the folks at much-maligned Fox News pulled off something much more impressive: they unveiled what could well be the future of American presidential politics. Or, at least for now, vice-presidential politics.

On the panel...

Boss Crump. Boss Hague. Boss Pendergast. Boss Daley. Boss Jim Gettys.

One might think they'd all suddenly been reincarnated -- as superdelegates. You know, those nefarious behind-the-scenes manipulators we're suddenly hearing all about, who are poised to rob the Democratic party yeoman of their God-given right to pick...

It's nine months until the election, seven months until the Democratic national convention, and four days until Super Tuesday. But already, it's clear that Barack Obama has won, at least in one key respect. Only he can now say that at some point, some day, he will be the...

It's highly entertaining to see conservative stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh, George Will, Robert Novak, and Grover Norquist inveighing against John McCain. Collectively, they and other panjandrums of the right are saying the same thing: that McCain isn't conservative enough for them, which means, ipso facto, that he's not conservative enough...

A few years ago, we learned that right-wing commentator Armstrong Williams, who had been noisily touting the virtues of "No Child Left Behind' on his radio program, was getting handsomely paid for his labors by the Bush administration's Department of Education. The liberal commentocracy went crazy, and rightly so....

The conventional wisdom is that after New Hampshire, the Democratic presidential equation is murky. Who's the front runner? It's difficult to say. Viewed another way, though, the Democratic future might now be clear for the next four, eight, twelve, or even sixteen years.

After enduring the scare of her life,...

Last week, just after she'd had her clock cleaned in the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton came out and cheerily declared that what had just happened was a great night for the Democrats. Even for her it was a crowning moment of inauthenticity, a speech which -- regardless of your...

I tuned in with millions of others last night as Roger Clemens insisted to Mike Wallace that he never took steroids. Like everyone else watching 60 Minutes, I looked for that telltale tic or gulp or stammer, that slightly unnatural over or under-emphasis in something that Clemens said, that usually...

Sometimes the most interesting events at historic commemorations are not on the program. Or they don't happen at all. Thus, at the ceremonies this week marking the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, there were no photographs of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery together....