It was supposed to be the night Richard Simmons died—a quiet night with quiet news. The kind of humdrum night that is dominated by...

The summer heat has been brutal. It has been oppressive. On Tuesday, the temperature in Central Park climbed to 89ºF. While 89ºF is a...

To write about Donald Trump is a risky endeavor. If one writes too critically about the former president, they are perceived as a “Trump...

The wisdom of the Greeks sometimes appears to be inexhaustible. In the epic poetry of Homer, you find thoughts, feelings, and emotions...

My dad and I made the 950-mile drive from Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, to Birmingham, Alabama, in one day, stopping only once for some gas...

or How Biden can have his Bogart moment In the film Casablanca, right and wrong are not easily distinguished. It’s a stark and amoral...

Everything that’s happened on the campaign trail so far Today The GoodbarBlog kicks off its coverage of the 2024 election. Any opinions...

Everything You Wanted to Know—and Everything You Didn’t—About This Year’s COP. Happy New Year to all of you who take the time to read...

The Parallels Between George Santos and Jay Gatsby On the heels of a damning House Ethics report—one which offered such prurient details...

This piece was supposed to be ironic. And it still is. But while working on it, I learned something about the slippery nature of the...

Syria's Bashar al-Assad didn’t set out to be a war criminal. He didn’t even set out to be president. He wanted to be an ophthalmologist,...

“The die is cast” For the better part of a week, I’ve been stymied. I wanted to write a light-hearted blog post, something breezy. I was...

The truth is tricky. Our relationship with the truth is even trickier. As evidence of this tricky relationship, take that great...

For years, failure bedeviled the Colorado Buffaloes and Twitter. Then both organizations changed their leadership. But whereas Deion...

Part II In The Iliad, we find, in inchoate form, the two options offered to a prodigy, viz. an early death with eternal renown or a long...

On Prodigies Part I If the earth continues its revolution around the sun, if my heart continues to beat and there’s still breath in my...

Deconstructing Oppenheimer The question of the summer, it turns out, was not who would indict Trump, what was happening in Ukraine, or...

Loyal members of China’s Communist Party hail Xi Jinping as “The Great Helmsman.” But Xi Jinping is not the first Great Helmsman. Mao...

Before I get into it, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to read last week’s blog. I was delighted with all the kind messages...

Welcome, friends, family, acquaintances, AARP members, Tiktok influencers, bounty hunters, arch bishops, sailors, landlubbers, carnival...