“Time Enough at Last.” The new year reminds me of that classic “Twilight Zone” episode starring Burgess Meredith as a put-upon bookworm. (No, he wasn’t reading on the wing of an airplane! Get your episodes straight, with “The Twilight Zone Companion,” for Pete’s sake!) True bibliophiles are all the same. Whether our preference is studying […]

Voters are, to understate their mood, disenchanted with Congress. Yet paradoxically, voters re-elect, over and over, the same representatives they hold in dismally low esteem, consider ineffectual and out-of-touch. On average for 2022, about 80 percent of polling respondents disapproved of how congressional representatives handled their jobs. Many critics had previously claimed that underrepresentation of […]

As a 10-year-old in 1953, I recall seeing newsreels at the movies, which showed the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It seemed like a big deal to millions of people, but my passions revolved around playing Little League baseball and cheering on my Cleveland Indians, not about the monarchy. Tina, by contrast, recalls that she […]

Barbara Walters might never have become a powerful force in broadcast journalism had she lacked the chutzpah to extract a promise from her bosses at NBC News in 1973. As she explained it to me, she had already worked at the “Today” show for a dozen years, serving first as a writer and then as […]

As a child, lying was something I rarely did. This was a function of two things: being Catholic and being lazy. But perhaps the most compelling reason not to lie is that you will always be outed. It may not happen immediately, but there is simply no way to go through life telling lie after […]

Earlier in December, Grace Stanke, a 23-year-old nuclear engineering student from Wausau, Wisconsin, was crowned Miss America 2023. Stanke is a beautiful, blonde-haired woman who is obviously gifted in math and science. She was crowned by her predecessor, Emma Broyles, Miss Alaska, who became the first woman from her state to win the title. But […]