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BREAKING UP THE U.S.A. TWO

January 14, 2012:In the London Review of Books for 15 December I came across a review of a new book by the English historian Norman Davies, who specializes in large volumes (this one is over 800 pages)...

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DON'T OCCUPY WALL STREET

January 24, 2012:What happened to Occupy Wall Street? Winter weather, presumably. Or maybe the movement was as evanescent as its message was vague. I wrote a piece about it that ran in the January...

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WHAT NEXT, PUSSYCAT?

February 4, 2012:What is next? Seedless apples?I don't know. I was in New York Thursday having lunch with a friend and had something under an hour to kill afterwards before my bus left, so I dropped...

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WHY I AM A DEMOCRAT

February 19, 2012:I read this morning in the Times that Rick Santorum thinks we should do away with public education.Words fail me.So yes, privatize everything. Turn the entire country into a business....

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THAT IRRITATING THING, KNOWLEDGE

March 9, 2012:The other day, trying to keep up, always a challenge, I read a piece in the New York Review of Books by William Nordhaus on climate change, and here is Paul Krugman, writing today about...

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THE VALUE OF BOOKS

March 27, 2012: A cold day, chilly in the house. It takes a long time to warm this house up. Yesterday was warmer and I spent a good part of the day on the front porch, which is enclosed but still the...

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GOLF FAN

April 9, 2012: When I was sixteen or seventeen I used to go over to the golf course on the other side of town and try to get caddying jobs, hoping to make a little money. I didn't play golf, didn't...

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WAR ON WOMEN

April 19, 2012: Lorraine and I happened to be in Virginia when the business came up about forcing women who wanted abortions to have an ultrasound probe inserted painfully in their vaginas...

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READING ROBERT CARO

May 16, 2012:     "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?"     So said the 1st Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon when presented with another volume...

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MEMORIAL DAY

     May 28, 2012: I've just come from Sag Harbor's annual Memorial Day parade, with its veterans, a few still remaining from World War II, its firemen, the high school band, an honor guard firing...

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ONE WORD: LIBERTY

June 30, 2012:     We were in Budapest, the last stop on our trip down the Danube, and we went to a small museum there devoted to the art of Southeast Asia. The collection had been put together by a...

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WHAT JEFFERSON KNEW

July 20, 2012:     I was in Washington in late June at the Library of Congress for a magazine piece I'm writing and was shown a few of Jefferson's books. Shown--I mean they were brought to a table in...

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DEAR GOD

August 26, 2012:          The New York Times Magazine has a piece today about evangelical, or is it pentecostal, pastors backing away from their religious beliefs and becoming atheists. Organizations...

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UNFORGIVEABLE CRIMES

September 14, 2012:          I have written about a lot of different things in my career, everything from the art world to ROTC to ethics to sports to adventure, among many others subjects, and for...

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POEM AGAIN

September 21, 2012:          Readers of this blog may remember that I wrote some time ago about how long it took to write a poem, and gave an example of one of my own called The Inventory that I was...

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BAD MANNERS

OCTOBER 24, 2012          We normally have breakfast at Starbuck's in Bridgehampton, not every morning, but often. This morning around 9:30 two women came in with a little girl, who proceeded to pop...

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IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORM/ELECTION/CHAOS

October 29, 2012:          The wind howls outside, Hurricane Sandy, and who can work? Or even read? The wind creates an internal tension. You know you'll lose power soon and not get it back for quite a...

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WHAT WE LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA

November 9, 2012:          I occasionally write a piece for MILITARY HISTORY in a series they call "What We Learned," which describes major battles and then talks briefly about what we learned from...

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WHAT I DO IN MY SPARE TIME

November 20, 2012:          My birthday tomorrow. Since it's also the day before Thanksgiving, it will be a busy day. Every day is busy, in a way, because my mind is the classic Buddhist monkey mind,...

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AMERICAN VIOLENCE

December 18, 2012:          When I enrolled at Princeton my brother, four years older and at Cornell, advised me to join ROTC in order to avoid the draft and fulfill my military obligations as an...

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