Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.

The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.

I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.

All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority.