2020
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One but not likely done
In 1932, Army veterans and their families came to demand bonuses for their World War I service. Under siege following…
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Chump
Cloud cuckoo land featured giraffes and “zerbas.” For a large number of early days on the planet I wished only…
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Metaphor in a mine
Deep down is brackish water, rails, a shovel, but nothing else. The blind man entombed in the coal mine is…
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Whistle
In NFL football, a penalty. In virus coverage, the more the merrier… In U.S. professional football, a congenitally violent sport,…
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18 years after 28 days
Back to the future, waiting to happen. Danny Boyle’s plague-driven 2002 film “28 Days Later” comes with an alternative ending.…
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Healing a sick new world
Earth-rise, as seen from Apollo 8 in 1968: forever a planet of ecstasy and agony. Here is what many know…
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An Eastertime dirge
Ask not for whom the bell tolls… The meaning of life is that it ends. • Franz Kafka, dead of tuberculosis at…
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With underwood aforethought
Not all Frank Underwood methods are fictional…. and the house of cards is all around. A not especially subtle American…
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Max’s burden
Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t send you home. No, wait, make that three…. Here is a Rome…
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When way of life comes first
Mickey Mantle in 1967 at Yankee Stadium after striking out in the twilight of his fabled career. Trey Hollingsworth and…
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Gyre
The center cannot hold… On the phone, my Rome ophthalmologist loses his cool. I have called to give him birthday…
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A hunchback named malaise
If the hump lessens its curve, things are good… Italy has just begun the first phase of its coronavirus recovery…
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Exodus
That streetlamp named Venus… The interlopers are leaving now, these creatures that came to roost and burrow in the long…
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Hollywood “Times”
A clever disgrace by a high-minded newspaper. Iwill keep this mercifully short. On May 24, a Sunday, “The New York…
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“Freed” into fire
Since video footage of the late May police killing of George Floyd was released, rioting has swept the United States.…
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Foo fighter
The school nurse was a stalwart line of defense against pretenders. When I first arrived in the United States I…
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Coronaball
Brad Pitt as Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team in the movie version of “Moneyball.” In 2003, American…
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Buzzing 2, Masked Men 0
Blows against the empire, so far futile. Two exterminators have come to my balcony empire, attempting to lay siege to…
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Choose! An American polemic
Donald Trump at Mount Rushmore on July 4, 2020. America’s not so beautiful these days. Blame it on a president…
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And the sun also rises
August downtime, short or long, remains sacrosanct in Rome. In June I made an appointment with my barber Franco whose…
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Over the edge
Who said anything about a round world? To believe the world was flat conferred wonderful advantages to any boy who…
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You can’t go home again
“Rin Tin Tin” was among the first and most popular dog dramas on American TV. As a boy, my Sicilian…
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Listening for music
COVID is no cancer… Some stories acquire their relevance and moral aptness only through repeated retelling, each recitation adding a…
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The I in me
Safety, if transformed into a relentless form of alarm, can soon turn sinister. Near-blindness makes the masked people look like…
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Liberally lucky
Safe, safe, safe…. or something terrible will happen. It began with relentlessly recycled footage of a hijacked commercial jet slamming…
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Uncle Joe’s heavy burden
After nearly 50 years in politics, Joe Biden can finally say mission accomplished. Joe Biden may or may not ably…
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Thoughts on gender
Travel writer Jan Morris, born James Humphry Morris, 1926-2020. Iread little in my teens. Here and there a book about…
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The underground man
Fatal beauty: A detail from Robert Wiles’s photo of 23-year-old Evelyn McHale, who jumped to her death from the 86th-floor…
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Qizzard
Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Magician,” a replica of which hangs in the Musée Municipal in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. For now, the museum is…
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