War cannot be left to filmmakers, historians and journalists. Their scope is too narrow, too shallow, however skilled they may be. War cannot be left to soldiers, politicians and preachers. Poets and artists must be called on to grasp all the dimensions of its horror and folly. For this reason, when you watch the 10-part [...]
Read More...Oh yes we do. Each of us encounters someone who knows just where our crazy buttons are and how to punch them, eliciting our most self-destructive impulses. That is the nature of terrorism, to induce us to dismantle ourselves because we are too big for the terrorists to do it. They are exhibitionists, extreme versions [...]
Read More...There were more than a few writers at The Providence Journal whom I admired as a young probationary reporter. One of them was Jack M. Thompson, with whom I worked for a time in the Warwick bureau. Jack had a way of turning a mess of notes into algorithmic prose: short, pithy sentences that didn’t [...]
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