Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

There have been commentaries of late about Philadelphia’s sports drought. Of the cities with at least one team in all four major American team sports, the City of Brotherly Love has gone the longest — 25 years — without a championship. This has come up because the Phillies, of course, are trying to break the [...]

Charles Bender was born just north of Lake Wobegon and he made his name during the baseball games that are played in October. Seems fitting, then, to gather on the eve of the World Series at Common Good Books, Garrison Keillor’s bookstore, to recall the days when Minnesota’s first Hall of Famer was the game’s [...]

The review was published three months ago, but it didn’t arrive at my door until, well, last Tuesday. So I’ll announce it as though it’s breaking news. Gail Huganir, managing editor of Central PA, made some very generous statements about Chief Bender’s Burden in the magazine’s July issue. “I’ll be the first to admit I [...]

• I recommend Frank Rich’s column today. I am not sure what’s harder to believe — that the McCain-Palin campaign has incited racist reaction or the fact that the media covers the story as though it was, say, akin to the distortion of his opponent’s tax plan. “From the start,” Rich writes, “there have always [...]

As we walked and talked, and the Beast walked and sniffed, the leaves were hard to ignore. Are there more brilliant colors on earth than the yellows and reds of fall? After spending most of last winter in shirtsleeves, I have been bracing for the change of seasons as I brace when I receive my [...]

I would have told you sooner except I just found out myself: I will sign copies of Chief Bender’s Burden from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., tomorrow (Saturday) at Central Avenue Bookstore. This free event — of course, it’s free — will be held in conjunction with downtown Faribault’s annual Fall Festival. At least that’s [...]

There are few topics more important than the economy and few topics I know less about. I keep starting articles about the mess but usually set them aside, as I would a phone bill written in Sanskrit. But last night I came across this piece by a Nobel Prize-winning economist that artfully describes how we [...]

There were times during the first half of the debate last night while John McCain was talking to his “friends” that I wondered what was going through Barack Obama’s mind. And I pretended that I knew.

This man is unraveling before my eyes. He sucked up to all of those people he hated in 2000, he [...]

Reading this article made me want to make a few endorsements of my own:

Churches should no longer receive tax exemptions. They don’t need them. They shouldn’t want them. A blunt line between church and state is better for both the church and the state. Besides, then preachers can say whatever the hell they want.
But if [...]

Finished The Wire last weekend — the final season was recently released on DVD — and already I miss McNulty. And Bunk. And Lester. And Carver. And Omar. So many terrific characters. Though I loved that much of the drama unfolded in a newsroom, the fifth season fell short of, say, the second or fourth [...]

Sometimes government does right where the market does not. Congress — finally — passed a federal law requiring health insurers to cover mental health in the same way as physical health. The law was long overdue, and yet easily could have been shelved for another session. As a Minnesotan, I’m heartened that a Republican like [...]