Paul Greenberg

Dept. of Correspondence

Dear Unhappy With Us, It is never wholly a pleasure, or a pleasure at all, to lose a subscriber, especially one like you, who tells me he’s been with us for 35 years through thick and thin and in-between.
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COLUMN ONE Letters Dept.

Dear Old Politician, It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you, as always, for you remain as eloquent and concise as ever. It makes me miss the bad old days when I got a chance to tear you apart every day—and viceversa.
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A thought a minute

“Depend upon it, sir,” said the sage Dr. Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” At the time, which was September of 1777, Samuel Johnson was trying to attribute his own eloquent appeal against the death penalty (“The Convict’s Address” ) to the condemned man.
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COLUMN ONE Questions

Why would anyone write “it goes without saying” if it really did? As in: “It goes without saying that Afghans have had enough of violence.”—Steve Coll in The New Yorker magazine’s “The Talk of the Town” column, October 26, 2009. If it goes without saying, why say it?
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A word for the Elizabethans

There is no end to the writing of books, said the author of Ecclesiastes, and today he could have said it of translations of the Bible.
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COLUMN ONE Coming Home

You need some time to prepare before looking at an exhibition of Carroll Cloar’s pictures. And some space—some distance from the ever twittering, tweeting, all-engulfing and devouring present. You don’t want to rush into his vision of the past—which is yours if you’re from anywhere in or around the Arkansas Delta.
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COLUMNISTS The Holocaust and me

WARSAW (AP)—The memorial museum at Auschwitz has launched a Facebook page hoping that the popular social-networking site will help it reach young people around the globe and engage them in discussions about the former Nazi death camp and the Holocaust. . . .
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COLUMN ONE The new Newspeak

“In our time, it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.” —George Orwell Ours is an age of euphemism.
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COLUMNISTS It’s all Henry Adams’ fault

Of Barack Obama and Thomas Jefferson

My downfall started at the University of Missouri. In the history department, to be exact. The faculty was quite small at the time, composed almost entirely of (a) young professors who would go on to make great names for themselves at schools like Stanford, or (b) older ones who were coming back from stints at Oxford or the Sorbonne to write the definitive book on their specialty.
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COLUMN ONE This way to the Tower of Babel

What ever happened to all those books attacking God, or at least the idea of God? They were quite fashionable not long ago.
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