Recent Oliver Wendell Holmes Commentaries

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Pursuit of Excellence
While Americans continue to struggle with a deadly virus and financial starvation, excellence in national leadership has been reduced to a group of toxic enablers that appeal to an insular “base” that promotes our worst impulses instead of our best. The ’60s suffered its own challenges. Civil rights. Vietnam. The assassination of three political leaders. But then something stunning happened....
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January 4, 2021
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The Latest... And Often Greatest
The Story of Chips, and The Cost of Looking Away
It’s just a photograph: a wartime dog sitting alert, ears up, wearing a military harness. But the story about a World War II sentry dog...
It’s Time to Talk About Respect
A cancer has been growing in our national life, so embedded in our culture that we’ve stopped acknowledging it. In the 1940s and the decades...
Adversity and Perseverance
“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”— Yvon Chouinard “Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem”—Eric Hoffer “Retreat, Hell!...
Who Decides What’s Seen?
There are moments when a single arrest tells us more about the state of the country than a thousand speeches. The recent detention of Don...
The Death of Shame
Over the past several months, I’ve written commentaries revisiting moments in our history when individuals confronted serious challenges and rose to meet them — to...
Because We Need It
From the man who invented The Tonight Show. What Steve Allen understood—long before humor became sharper and more performative—is that laughter can be light and...