Once upon a time there was a cub reporter who was mad about words. He could not resist them. His sentences ran on and on, and on, clauses piled upon clauses. He loved dashes; he embraced the voluptuous parentheses. His single paragraphs often ran to half a column.Then one day his beloved city editor sent […]

In the runup to the invasion of Iraq, opponents of the war asked: Once the U.S. decides to police the world, where will it stop?I’ve got the answer: Liberia.There’s no doubt that Liberia is a mess. It was a mess before 1980, when Master Sgt. Samuel Doe overthrew the government, murdering President William Tolbert and […]

The United States owes democracy to Liberia. If that means sending in troops, as President Bush has hinted at, then let’s roll.The American Colonization Society, supported by leading slaveowners such as Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, founded Monrovia, named for President James Monroe, in what we now know as Liberia. In 1847, Liberia became “the […]

WASHINGTON – Here’s how Maine’s members of Congress were recorded on major roll call votes in the week ending July 11. HOUSE Overtime rules Voting 210 for and 213 against, the House on July 10 refused to block proposed changes in overtime rules that are supported by business groups and opposed by labor. This advanced […]

Arrrgh! It was bound to happen, an improvement on an improved method of shaving. Attention, consumers with bodily hair: The razor industry has news for you! You will never in a million years guess what this news is, unless your IQ is higher than zero, in which case you’re already thinking: “Not another blade! Don’t […]

“What’s the hold-up?” shouted a journalist. He was asking a State Department spokesman why Liberian President Charles Taylor hadn’t yet acted on his acceptance of Nigeria’s offer of exile. Never mind that barely a day had passed – the reporter saw this as a “hold-up.” Welcome to today’s media, a group so determined to find […]

If you loved Iraq, you should be seriously gung-ho about Liberia. You have hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. You have a brutal head of state. You have a nation longing for peace and true democracy – and a region that could benefit from the establishment of one.These, after all, were among the many concocted […]

Law school figures show that race is a massive factor in admissions. Some analysts assure us that the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decisions represent a moderate, split-the-difference approach, since the undergraduate preference plan at the University of Michigan was invalidated, while the university’s law school plan was upheld.But the undergraduate plan was a no-brainer. Almost all […]

Don’t ever think that being a professional writer is an easy life. People always ask me: “Is it hard to be a professional writer like you and Joyce Carol Oates?”Yes. Very hard. Here is a true example of the kind of difficulties we face:The other day I was in sitting at my desk in my […]

The Court of Peeves, Crotchets and Irks resumes its summer assizes with a pet peeve from J. Robert Routt of Cincinnati. He is irked by the Irrelevant If and moves for its extinction. His motion will be granted.This is the irksome construction, from The New York Times last September: “But if glacial growth provided the […]