Police officers were dispatched Thursday to find Wisconsin state lawmakers who apparently had boycotted a vote on a sweeping bill that would strip most government workers of their collective bargaining rights.
I received a call the other day from an agreeable lady at C-SPAN, asking me to do a show with the network called "In Depth." It will take a lot of time, as C-SPAN wants to interview me on all the books I have written. Also, it will last three hours. That is a marathon. I can hardly listen for three hours, much less talk. Yet I have been a fan of C-SPAN for years, so I could hardly say no. Also, I am an advocate of the printed word. I want it to survive.
While the insider culture of Washington has always had about it a strong whiff of conniving, self-serving raffishness, there always has been a handful of political figures who have striven to do the right thing by the people who sent them into the arena.
Presidents, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might say, are not like you and me, and neither are their families.
The idea that a sporting event could be fixed by a single individual astounded Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation. "It never occurred to me," he said in "The Great Gatsby," "that one man could start to play with the faith of 50 million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."
Of the making of many books on Ernest Hemingway there is no end. In the nearly 46 years since Hemingway'sdeath, scholars and enthusiasts have published book-length works on everything related to his life and provided inventive interpretations of his novels and short stories.
