Cracked Window

Oh, the travails of parenthood. How do father and mother anticipate this scenario: Atticus, newly turned three, begins crying. We find him wearing on his head a rigid cardboard can, his Lincoln Logs container. "Why are you crying, son?" I ask. "It's stuck!" he wails. We can't budge it. Suzame pries out his ears and holds his...

I stand in the rain. The Avett Brothers are about to take the stage in Portland at the Oregon Zoo amphitheater. So miserable is the weather this night that wife and little son fled for home after the opening act. Everyone is soaked and cold. While I wait, tunes from "Emotionalism" play in my head. Soon...

Three weeks from tonight, I'll attend my forty-year high-school reunion in Winter Park, Florida. We were invited to write about a memory. I chose not the end-of-school campout of about twenty-five guys. It only lasted a few hours because a Seminole County sheriff's deputy busted us just as the drunken revelry was cranking up. A...

Many years ago I worked at Florida Today, the daily newspaper in Brevard County. That's the county Tropical Storm Fay drowned this week in twenty-five inches of rain. For a while I worked a late-night shift. During a periodic commitment to not hit the bars with the gang after work, I'd run along the Indian River...

After reading this account of programming errors plaguing touchscreen voting machines in Ohio, can anyone have any confidence in a free and fair election? Too bad the story doesn't detail if there's any pattern to the dropped votes. For example, how do they correlate to the party registration of voters whose ballots aren't counted? And why...

John McCain's inability to remember how many houses he owns is a gaffe that will prove more damaging than John Edwards getting a $400 haircut. Count on it. Especially because McCain, after consulting with his staff, said the number is at "at least four" when in fact it may be ten or more. The Jed Report...

For about the tenth time in a week, I've been hit up for money by the Democratic National Committee. Solitictors call me on the phone, send me emails, corner me outside the grocery — you name it. This evening, a nice but persistent young woman came to my door to ask again. When I told her...