Many highbrows have been standing over boxing and counting it out these days. But as the figures of Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and others attest, pugilism has had an enormous impact on American history. And rightfully so. If sports are ritualized enactments of the struggle that...

My mother came onto the field after the tackle. She looked very concerned. I quietly asked the lineman standing next to me, "Who is that lady?" It took about five minutes for my neurons to re-align and my memory to return. I had just received my first concussion in football....

No offense to Bill Maher and the irreligious, but Senator Ted Kennedy was a man of faith and as such I do not think he would smirk at the use of a Bible tale to help frame his life. I'm thinking here of Peter's denial of Christ, John 18:15-18, 25-2....

The host of HBO's Real Time, Bill Maher, needs a reality check. And not just because he keeps bringing back P.J. O'Rourke, who last night touted his seminal book on the cars that he loves, and then acknowledged that the one thing that Obama is doing right is opening up...

It is a truism to claim that profundities often lurk in good humor. Wanda Sykes performance last night at the White House Correspondents dinner was a prime example of the truth wrapped in a joke.

Midway through her routine. Ms Sykes started railing against the very idea that anyone...

Maybe Hamas isn't so stupid after all. People on both sides of the Gaza crisis have been shaking their heads, why would Hamas break the ceasefire and launch rockets into Israel? They had to know the Armageddon type response that would follow. Hamas had to know that the strikes would...

Help me out with this one. Would you encourage your twenty-something kids to vacation in a country currently involved in an unjust war? Next week my sons, who are Jewish by birth, are on their way to Israel for this first trip. Hopefully, they will be cosseted from rocket exchanges,...

The election of Barack Obama last week proved Alexis de Tocqueville's claim that democracies have a unique ability to correct themselves. But the returns also returned a more profound and philosophical truth-- the truth that the self is a layered entity; the truth that there can be reverberations in the...

Towards the end of last Thursday's vice presidential debate, Joe Biden was asked to explain how he would change the tone of political discourse in Washington. Biden eloquently described a moment when as a young senator who was furious with his colleague Jesse Helms. Apparently, Biden began percolating theories about...

For those who abide by the temperament criterion of presidential selection, the one concern about Barack Obama was that he might not have temper enough, that he might be too calm. So far as I am concerned, Obama's life story and his campaign for the nomination are...

Wanted: President of the United States: Educational Background, Not a Factor.

Everyone claims to be for better teachers and schools. Both Democrats and Republicans, to say nothing of independents, fervently believe that American children should receive a first-rate education. After all, democracy is great but not...

How strong is the impulse to denial in America? Remarkably, some continue to wonder whether or not race remains an issue in the presidential election. The answer was written on my windshields last week. I have an Obama sign on my front lawn in suburban Minnesota and as of...

If John Edwards is a true believer in the public private distinction that will be used to shrug off his affair, then he should still hang his head for the fact that he was willing to put his party and the nation on the pyre. It is one thing...

This morning I watched a passel of middle-aged women trundling by my window. They were out walking. Now and then one of them would pull up close and pat the other on the shoulder and then drift off. The way they were knit together they looked like a gaggle of...

I am grateful that...

Three weeks ago, The New York Times vented a secret Department of Justice memo approving the use of torture as a means of interrogation. President Bush shrugged the memo off insisting, "This government does not torture people." Times columnist Frank Rich, who begs to differ with the president, published...

I was in a funk last week and a person in a funk sometimes makes bad decisions. Like the other night -- I decided to take in Michael Moore's SiCKO to shake some of the horrible thoughts I was having. Very bad idea: like treating food poisoning by downing a...

I was in a funk last week and a person in a funk sometimes makes bad decisions. Like the other night-- I decided to take in Michael Moore's Sicko to shake some of the horrible thoughts I was having. Very bad idea: like treating food poisoning by downing a milkshake....

In the tsunami of discussion that followed President Bush's surge speech, it was evident that many professional opinion and policy makers have been telling themselves that the intractable problems in Iraq are largely the result of a lack of courage and resolve on the part of the Iraqi people. As...

President Bush once remarked that he lept into the fray of politics in an attempt to undo the moral relativism of the sixties. In that regard, he has frequently exercised his presidential sneer for what he takes to be sixty-ish situation type ethics. Yet, for all of his absolutist...