What Peter Cullen, best known for his role as Optimus Prime, meant to me.

What Peter Cullen, best known for his role as Optimus Prime, meant to me.

On the American practice of keeping the deed and discarding the man who did it

On intellect, wisdom, and an American machinery that has learned to mistake speed for truth

Questions of Mercy One of the last long conversations I had with my father was about his house. The primary bedroom needed work. Something under the carpet had gone soft, and he had been meaning to …

On the dead who cannot testify, the families who do, and the machinery that believes whoever speaks first

In Service, Never in Possession There is a stair in my house the builders refused to leave plain. The risers are set with tile — Aztec-inspired, geometric, the glaze gone soft and oceanic with …

The Story of Bonnie Kornhaber Marriage begins with a promise so old most people no longer hear how strange it is. Two people stand before witnesses and swear themselves into one another’s …

The Country We Carried We have been here for all of it. Before the flag knew what it wanted to mean, before the anthem learned to swell in stadiums, before the country taught its children to place …

The American Disappearance America loves a beginning. We love the swollen belly, the baby shower, the tiny shoes placed like prophecy on a nursery shelf. We love the ultrasound photograph, the gender ...

One Year Later There was no funeral. I want you to hold that for a moment before we go any further, because the absence of it shapes everything that follows. There was no room where people gathered …

A stiff drink is recommended

The absurdity of a man who avoided Vietnam due to “bone spurs” dancing on the grave of a decorated combat veteran

The Endings We Deserve There are deaths that break your heart, and there are deaths that indict the world. I have known both. My father died in the oldest loneliness there is: the loneliness of being ...

There are lives that arrive like weather, and there are lives that arrive like light. Kingsley was my light.

As a civil rights activist, he joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and Memphis. He later launched two historic presidential campaigns.

54 Miles from Selma to Montgomery There is a particular American superstition — polite, well-dressed, lethal in its calm — that time itself performs the labor of justice. That the mere …

Losing Sleep “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Last week at the office, more than …

Because We Can They will tell you this began last night, with the whine of jets and the bloom of fire over Caracas. They will tell you it began with a name — Maduro — spoken the way …