Matt Labash

Whenever I need to check out of the world, I head to a place called Satan's Creek. I go there to catch-and-release—or maybe catch-and-ogle—God's most perfect creatures: wild brook trout. They come small in these mountain runs. An 11-incher would be considered trophy-size. Still, bringing one to…

Whenever I need to check out of the world, I head to a place called Satan's Creek. I go there to catch-and-release—or maybe catch-and-ogle—God's most perfect creatures: wild brook trout. They come small in these mountain runs. An 11-incher would be considered trophy-size. Still, bringing one to…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple-choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum…

Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Last February 14, "Ask Matt Labash" dissented from Valentine's Day. One year later, the editorial staff submitted a question (under the name "All Out of Love") asking if he felt any different now. His response, written with his characteristic flourish, was, "No."

Dear Matt,

Like any dutiful Washington swamp creature, I’ve spent the last few days holed up with Fire and Fury. Which is not, if you’ve been in news-cycle hibernation, the new fragrance from Ivanka. Rather, it is a book by Michael Wolff about life inside Mar-a-Lago North, aka the Trump White House.

Correction, 12/21/2017: The piece originally said that "If you have children under the age of seventeen, while you’re getting an additional $1,000 per child, you’re losing their personal exemption, which was worth $4,050 per child. (So you’re still short by $2,050, per child.)" It has been amended…

As we celebrate this Christmas season (or this “holiday,” for Christ-haters), I don’t wish to be a killjoy to the world. But reflecting on the year gone by, it’s hard not to notice that we have lost a few of our favorite things: Tom Petty, political moderation, our dignity.

As we celebrate this Christmas season (or this “holiday,” for Christ-haters), I don’t wish to be a killjoy to the world. But reflecting on the year gone by, it’s hard not to notice that we have lost a few of our favorite things: Tom Petty, political moderation, our dignity.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

As white supremacists go, Joey Gibson makes for a lousy one. For starters, he’s half Japanese. “I don’t feel like I’m Caucasian at all,” he says. Not to be a stickler for the rules, but this kind of talk could get you sent to Master Race remedial school.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Whatever being a red-blooded American man means these days (not much, it seems), I like to think I am one. I chop wood. I’ve never had a manicure and refuse to wear skinny jeans. I relieve myself outdoors with great regularity, even when indoor options are available. And though I don't hunt my own…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

There is nothing more boring than other people’s dreams, so I try to forget most of my own. Life's waking nightmares are vivid enough. But I'm dogged by one I had the other night. I was standing in a favorite fishing hole up to my waist, attempting to release a largemouth bass I'd just caught. Slow…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

For the last many years, my New Year's Eves have had a ritual sameness: Put on my party heels, pour several warm-up pops, then take off for a friend's house to join him, his lovely wife, and a circle of regulars, who, as my friend delicately puts it, "come to watch you make an ass of yourself."…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We'll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We'll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown…

Have a question for Matt Labash, ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash, ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We’ll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We'll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

It doesn't seem right, really—romanticizing catastrophe instead of just confronting its grim particulars head-on. Still, they cut quite a swath at Sir Harry's Bar in the Waldorf-Astoria, these brave men with forearm tattoos and walrus mustaches—firefighting volunteers who have swooped in from…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask it here.

Orlando

Cleveland

Cleveland

Cleveland

Los Angeles

It's that magical time in the presidential cycle again, when all the preelection year’s wild conjecture, clueless handicapping, and abject foolishness has ended, so that the election year's wild conjecture, clueless handicapping, and abject foolishness can begin. It's that time when panicked,…

I've never been one for elaborate New Year’s rituals. I don't thump the walls with bread to rid the house of evil spirits, as some do in Ireland. Nor swing caged fireballs around my head to torch last year's misfortune, as they do in Stonehaven, Scotland. I don't make hollow resolutions, since I…

Sanger, Calif.

As a committed, long-standing Twitter detractor, I’ve exhaustively bashed the social networking site for all imaginable crimes, and even unimaginable ones.  But through the gift of hindsight, I admit giving Twitter short-shrift in one department: it tends to work like they say old age does,…

Seattle

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been ignoring Bruce Jenner. As a child of the ’70s, I ignored him in the cereal aisle, where his Olympic-champion mug couldn’t entice me to pick his terminally bland Wheaties over more healthful Sugar Smacks. I ignored him in the ’80s, during his star-turn in…

I've had a lot of dogs of many different physical types, but each has come loaded with the same daunting reminder: the countdown clock I can’t help but hear ticking away inside of them. I suppose I come with one of those, too, if I care to confront reality. Denial may be easier on the nerves, but…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Matt Labash reading his casual essay "After Moses, Solomon."

Seoul

Editor's note: "[F]our-time former governor and ex-convict Edwin Edwards -- a Louisiana icon, both beloved and reviled -- has lost his first, and likely last, political race at the ballot box," the Times-Picayune reports. We're reprinting this article on Edwards's attempted comeback, which…

The news broke hard in my house this morning that Marion Barry, Washington D.C.’s former Mayor for Life, was dead at the age of 78. Of the profile subjects featured in my 2010 collection, Fly Fishing With Darth Vader, he’s the third I’ve had to eulogize in the last few years. (The other two being…

Of all the rituals I count on to give my life shape, there is none so sacred as witnessing my former brother-in-law, Mike Benton, stand for local office in our pleasant burg of Calvert County, Maryland. Though my wife’s sister wound down with Mike two decades ago, he and I have a…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Matt Labash reading his essay "They Like Mike."

As a lifelong white person​—​or Person Without Color, for the more sensitively inclined​—​I have nothing against white people. I mean, sure, at this late date in their history, I’m all too aware of the dubious and disheartening white-people statistics. Nearly all Prius owners, Vineyard Vines…

If I sported a hairpiece, I’d be wearing it at half-mast right about now, upon hearing that the world just grew a little less interesting.  For the most colorful man who ever inhabited Congress, former Ohio Democratic Rep. James A . Traficant Jr., expired today at the age of 73.  Traficant—he of…

The surest way to know who you are is to understand who you are not. For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought myself a simple man. I prefer hamburgers to fancy cheeseburgers, with all their dolled-up, dairy-fied excess. I have a “Simplicity” calendar with lots of Lao Tzu quotes. I would rather…

Gonzales, La.

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.” ​—​Philip K. Dick The first time I saw someone wearing Google Glass in the wild, I was standing at a friend’s party at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin​—​the place where the…

Now that “software is eating the world,” in the words of Marc Andreessen, every once in awhile, we dinosaur types like to try our luck in the land of Web 2.0, 3.0, or Whatever.0 we’re on at the moment. To that end, I recently applied to become a driver at Lyft, the “ride-sharing” service where…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with senior writer Matt Labash, reading his recent casual, "My App-Lyfting Story."

Hollywood, Fla.

Though four decades shy of being an octogenarian myself, I’m starting to know how they feel. For at the hurtling speed of change these days, even a casual observer of the scene is unwittingly turned into a perpetual obituarist, forever marking the loss of old friends. So it was again last week,…

Berwyn, Ill.

Baltimore

Like most civilized people of goodwill and sound reason, I’ve always held that violence isn’t the answer. It is, however, an answer. Which is why if I ever see Larry Randolph again, I intend to knock his teeth out. 

“The Machine,” they exclaimed, “feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. .  .  . [T]he Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.” —E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909)

Romney, W.V. 

Last week, at the beach with my family, I deliberately ignored all newspapers. Not for the reason most people do—because print is dead. But because whenever I’m surrounded by salt -water, steamed crabs, and even mediocre fishing, I tend to hold that true happiness is having no idea what chronically…

Cambridge, Mass.

I woke up this morning to about ten emails from journalist friends asking if our mutual friend, Andrew Breitbart, was really dead. “Really” was the operative word. Some meant it in the traditional sense: Is it possible for the human inferno that Breitbart resembled to have actually been…

When I think about the American-postcard moments of my life—-Fourth of July fireworks, Veterans’ Day parades, watching American Chopper reruns—there is none so emblematic as the evening I just spent in the flat-screened glow of the Super Bowl, having a few pops and making chitchat with my new…

A few days ago, after the last presidential debate in South Carolina, I was gauging the reaction of some Real People, as opposed to the Fake People who populate my seedy little racket. I don’t talk to Real People often if I can help it, as they tend to confuse the emerging media narrative with…

Manchester, N.H.

No secrets are being divulged when I report that Christopher Hitchens liked a drink every now and then. Preferably now. He wasn’t sloppy about it. In fact, he always seemed in perfect control. (I once saw him steer a beach bike through the streets of Key West without spilling his Scotch.) He just…

For 13 years now, I have been a Yahoo! Mail customer. Notice I didn’t say a “proud” Yahoo! Mail customer. For if you use Yahoo! for emailing, there is nothing to be proud of. As Gmail or even AOL users will eagerly explain, Yahoo! has always had a down-market feel. It’s like buying your suits at…

New York 

As a child-rearer, I’ve always prided myself on my carefree attitude and libertine ways. No “helicopter parenting” for this guy, no childproofing my children’s childhoods. If the kids set themselves on fire with their Zippos, not a problem—they can just douse the flames with their beers. Likewise,…

Close after dawn and armed with a local map I take a stroll in empty fields, canyons, woods, but preferably near a creek or river because since childhood I’ve loved the sound they make. Moving water is forever in the present tense, a condition we rather achingly avoid.

As with Christmas form letters and amateur poetry, I don’t take kindly to friends sticking books in my hand that lie outside my areas of interest, then insisting that I must read them. When one recently did just that with Born to Run, it was nearly cause for excommunication. Sure, I subscribe to…

Miami 

Just how Sarah is Sarah Palin’s Alaska, her new hit reality show on the TLC network? It’s soooo flippin’ Sarah, as Sarah would say. And it’s soooo Alaska, which Palin pronounces “A-LASK-ahhhh.” She repeats this on the show over and over again, as though we might forget where she’s from otherwise.…

In the barbaric cave for the dead

For my recent week in Haiti, I was armed by our art director with a camera, and commanded to take usable pictures. I am not a professional photographer, but he assures me these qualify. (In this week's print edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, you can see more photographs from shooters who actually…

For the last many years, my New Year’s Eves have had a ritual sameness: Put on my party heels, pour several warm-up pops, then take off for a friend’s house to join him, his lovely wife, and a circle of regulars, who, as my friend delicately puts it, “come to watch you make an ass of yourself.”…

Surely there are worse PR gigs than flacking for the Libyan government, but I can't think of many. It's not that there's never good news emanating from the province of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who's displayed humility throughout his 40-year dictatorial reign by never promoting himself to…

Let me live in a house by the side of the road, Where the race of men go by; The men who are good and the men who are bad, As good and as bad as I. --from Sam Walter Foss's 'House by the Side of the Road,' the first poem Marion Barry recited in church as a boy In most conceptions of Washington,…

On June 15, I went to bed with a pang of melancholy, Father Time having slipped another year out of my back pocket while my attention was elsewhere. Thirty-nine years earlier, I'd been brought into this world the same way that I suspect I'll depart it: naked and crying for my mom.

Orlando

One upside of the recession is that I cut through the newspaper as never before. Since the news is too bad to actually read, I skip it, assuming I know what's there--the sky is blackening, plagues are being unleashed, the rivers are running red with blood--and I instead skim for pretty pictures of…

Look at the outer shell--the parachute pants, the piano-key tie, the fake tuxedo T-shirt--and you might mistake me for a slave to fashion. Do not be deceived. Early adoption isn't my thing. I much prefer late adoption, that moment when the trend-worshipping sheeple who have early-adopted drive the…

This is the place where bad times get sent to make them belong to somebody else, thus, it seems easy to agree about Detroit because the city embodies everything the rest of the country wants to get over.

A strange thing happened to me this election cycle. After examining my conscience, determining that I did indeed have one, I decided not to cast a vote for president. I informed my inner circle, who immediately attacked. I was called an idiot, an irresponsible citizen, and less than a man. Even…

I'm not against children's literature, though I'm not exactly for it either. Books make kids smart. Smart kids grow into smart young adults. And smart young adults will eventually compete with us in the workforce, hastening our obsolescence. As I tell young people when they ask me how to get…

I fish because I love to .  .  . because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond…

Minneapolis

Anderson Cooper almost got hit by a cardboard sign in the streets of New Orleans! But did he go inside? No, there's no cameras inside! He's brave! When everybody else is coming out, he goes in! He's like the 9/11 fireman of CNN hosts! Or Al Roker! Either/or! Go Anderson! Go Gore-Tex!

Roanoke

Every spring in Washington, a ritual commences with the predictability of the cherry blossoms blooming around the Tidal Basin or the silvery hickory shad making their spawning run up the Potomac. Frumpy reporters put on their party heels and enshroud their hunchbacks in Men's Wearhouse tuxedos,…

New Orleans

Some people think cults are creepy. But as a child in the seventies, I rather enjoyed them. Whether Jonestowners, the Children of God, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, I always waited for the inevitable plot twist, when whatever had attracted the crazy cultists to each other in the first…

Miami

Every four years, I use the period of quiet contemplation that precedes the mad swirl of caucuses and primaries to make myself a better citizen/journalist. I do so by abandoning my usual political position of completely disengaged nihilism, upgrading to a more civically conscious indifferent…

"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it," the French playwright Beaumarchais once noted. But his heedless naïveté can be forgiven. Beaumarchais expired in 1799, well before the advent of today's endless presidential campaigns. Here, if everything that was not worth saying were sung, the…

New York/Miami

Wilmington, Del.

In our over-eroticized culture, it is common to hear people rate their enthusiasms by saying they are "better than sex." I reluctantly volunteer that information about fly fishing. For I like "spawning" as much as any non-fisherman--more even. But unlike fly fishing, it's a hard activity to perform…

Los Angeles

New Orleans

For independent-minded journalists, there are better ways to see the world than media junkets. But--and my accounting department will back me up here--there aren't many better ways to pay for it. So two weeks ago, I set out for Israel on the dime of the American Israel Education Foundation,…

When I was a college twerp, surrounded by my college-twerp friends, we sat around like Gambino-family capos, deciding how to carve up the kingdom. They resolved to put their marketing majors to work in the captain-of-industry perches that were their birthrights, taking what was theirs as assistant…

Exactly four years ago in this space, I documented the failed campaign of my former brother-in-law, Mike Benton, whom the enemies of freedom decided not to make clerk of the circuit court of Calvert County, Maryland. I owed him ink for an old favor. When we were both setting standards of academic…

We are wayfaring, wandering gypsies alone

Piscataway, N.J.

Las Vegas

WHEN I WAS A COLLEGE NEWBIE, sitting at the scuffed Hush Puppies of my journalism professors, they tried to saddle me with their elbow-patched baggage of what a journalist should be: Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ernie Pyle--lightweights, all. The poor naïfs couldn't have known about the tectonic…

Minneapolis

New Orleans

Weare, New Hampshire

The so--called Christmas wars have raged for two months without my help, and I won't be adding to the din. I will admit, however, to being a Christmas fascist. Frequently lampooned, Christians are expected to silently turn the other cheek. But Christmas, it turns out, is a great time for paybacks.…

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I remember where I was during the exact hour on July 29, 1981, when Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married. I was in bed asleep, proudly uninterested. Only 11 at the time, I'd already fashioned my lifelong foreign policy toward the Royals. It comes in the form of a question,…

IF YOU'RE IN THE REPORTING game long enough, old stories start repeating on you like a bean pie past its freshness date. So it felt as we gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to celebrate the Millions More Movement, Louis Farrakhan's sequel to his 1995 Million Man March. It seems like only a…

THERE AREN'T MANY GOOD PLACES to get lost anymore, but I know of one near where I live. It's deep in southern Maryland's Calvert County, past the steamed-crab stands and empty tobacco barns, which are fast losing ground to tanning salons, "Embroid Me" shops, and other strip-mall abscesses. Just…

New Orleans

Tombstone, Arizona

Roanoke, Virginia

San Francisco

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. --Margaret Atwood, Canadian writer Vancouver, British Columbia

YOU'VE GOT TO HAND IT to our political players. Even with the onset of second-term ho-hums, everyone did his part to convey the momentousness of what some wags call the "peaceful non-transfer of power." Republicans turned out for the inauguration in cashmere-swaddled, mink-stoled finery, dutifully…

THE MOST DESULTORY happenstance can irrevocably alter our lives. So it went last Christmas, the day I became an intolerable bore. My sister-in-law, who'd finally exhausted the effeminate sweater collection from Banana Republic, decided instead to buy me something I'd actually requested. I'd wanted…

Little Rock, Arkansas

Raleigh, NC

AT THE END of every election cycle, we hope to retire the clichés that have bedeviled us. Yet every four years, they reemerge from dormancy, causing pain, discomfort, and minor inflammation. We hold these clichés to be self-evident: (1) that this campaign season, like all those before it and…

SIX MONTHS AGO, in the Kingdom of Bahrain, an interesting television experiment, broadcast throughout the Middle East, came and went without much fanfare. Reality TV, in the form of Big Brother Middle East, made its debut, was embraced by viewers, then in just over a week was shown the door by a…

New York

New York

[img nocaption float="right" width="360" height="358" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8851[/img] I USED TO THINK that there was nothing wrong with street activists that a good scrubbing and a few rubber bullets couldn't fix. But that's before I met Adam Eidinger on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C.…

Boston

Boston

Boston

NO MATTER WHAT KIND of life you lead, there is inevitably a guidebook to help you lead it. Right now, as we speak, on Amazon.com, one can find a Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World, or a Guide to Living in Sin Without Getting Burned, or a Fat Girl's Guide to Life. There are…

New York

CONSIDERING THAT I'm writing this from inside the bunker of what many regard as the Alliance of Neocon Warmongers, it bears mentioning that Michael Moore and I have one surprising trait in common: We both believe that the war in Iraq was ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed, an apparent…

I GENERALLY don't advocate drinking whisky for breakfast. But on occasion, when necessity dictates, it does have a way of setting the world right. I was on the fifth day of a Scotches of Scotland distilleries tour, stewing in my Highlands hotel perched on a bluff overlooking Moray Firth. My cell…

IF YOU'RE THE SORT OF PERSON who reads stories by scrambling feature writers who spackle three anecdotal trends together in order to convince you, the gullible reader, that a movement is sweeping the land, then I probably don't have to tell you that four out of five culture critics agree: Jesus is…

WHEN ASKED why they entered journalism, pretentious reporters will say they did so to expose injustice. But honest ones will admit that half the fun is confirming your own prejudices. One of my deepest-held is that 80 percent of the world, outside these United States, is a dreary, dysfunctional…

WHEN I WAS A KID, my parents found Jesus, took to Him like otters to water, and left the more traditional churches of their upbringing to enlist as full-fledged evangelicals. Depending on where my military-officer father's assignments took us, we did turns in all kinds of nearly indistinguishable…

AT LAST WEEK'S OPENING OF Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," I never expected actually to see Jesus. Yet there he was, carnival-barking on the Connecticut Avenue sidewalk outside the Avalon Theatre in Washington, D.C. He stood out in his long brown hair and tunic. "Blessed are the…

I love to do my thing / Ha . . . and I don't need, no one else / Sometimes I feel so nice, good God / I jump back, I wanna kiss myself.--James Brown

Manchester, New Hampshire

NOT ALWAYS, BUT OFTEN, there comes a point in a Howard Deaniac's life when it's no longer enough to blog yourself silly, or to throw Dean-centric house parties, or to quit your job, move to Burlington campaign headquarters, and start dressing like a bike messenger. Sometimes, you've got to take off…

WHENEVER I EXPRESS my penchant for reality television in the circle of snide, knowing, not-as-smart-as-they-think-they-are crosspatches that I'm cursed to call friends, I often do so defensively, as if I am advocating Satan-worshipping or kid-touching. No more. From it's earliest dawn--when MTV's…

WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN was pulled from his spider hole looking like a bedraggled Walt Whitman after a month-long poetry slam, I experienced joy not just as an American, but as someone whose spirit has been knitted to those of my liberated Iraqi brothers. For a day, anyway, I felt like an Iraqi, and…

SOME DAYS, when the after party in Iraq isn't going so well--which is to say, most days--I'm put in mind of the Bush administration's admonition to be sunny-side-up journalists, to eliminate the negative, to accentuate the positive. God knows I try. I take stock in small victories, often…

Boston, Massachusetts

TRY AS I MIGHT, there's no getting around it: I'm all man. I make this statement of faith not because I checked myself out in the shower before writing this article. Nor because I possess all your typical man-like properties--though I do: I can eat two hamburgers in one sitting, I hate spooning, I…

San Diego, Calif.

MILLIONS OF AMERICANS along the eastern seaboard are hunkered down in fear, weathering the effects and aftermath of Hurricane Isabel. Millions more are rending their garments, collapsing in sustained crying jags, and cursing their Maker over the untimely demises of John Ritter, Johnny Cash, and the…

Des Moines, Iowa

THERE WAS A TIME, not long ago, when primetime television was populated by famous people. Someone appearing on TV meant that they'd likely worked their way up through the ranks: doing school plays, regional theater, and embarrassing commercials, until finally, they honed their skills, perfected…

AT THE RISK of blowing my cover as a debonair man of refinement, I have a confession: I like booty. Not the lust-generating fleshy musculature advertised by J.Lo or Beyoncé Knowles. That would be cheap booty. I like the kind that's free. Often in this business, prospective subjects assume your…

Fairfax, Virginia

WITH THE RELEASE this week of "Living History," it is worth noting that this title is not Hillary Rodham Clinton's first foray into children's literature. In 1996, came her blockbuster smash, "It Takes A Village," in which she condescended to parents as if they were children , by preaching the…

"And so we brought our dead man home. Flew his body back, faxed the obits to the local papers, called the priests, the sexton, the florists and stonecutter. We act out things we cannot put in words." --Thomas Lynch, "The Undertaking"

IN MY CORNER of the world, there are two kinds of people I generally abhor: those who pretend they don't watch television, and those who do watch television, but pretend they don't watch reality television. To the former, I usually display awe--you can also live without Jimmy Reed albums, red meat,…

[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] Umm Qasr, Iraq

Safwan, Iraq

Kuwait City

Safwan, Iraq

Kuwait City

Kuwait City

Kuwait City

Kuwait City

En Route to Kuwait City