A concert by Mark Knopfler and his band, seen April 21 in Kansas City, promoting his album Get Lucky, was tremendous. If you live within 250 miles (the distance from Fayetteville, as it happens) and have some extra 20s for tickets, try to see it; otherwise listen to the record. Though usually featuring electric instruments, […]
DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — You expect government to be naive sometimes, but some prominent research universities — that’s you, Cornell — treat animals like birdbrains. This week, they formally gave up on finding the ivory-billed woodpecker. This was reported in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which for a half-decade has kept a special projects team just for hard-hitting […]
Principled newsrooms allow no gifts, but at Christmas the rule gets softened. One of the utilities has giant tins of caramel corn delivered, staffers dive in, and all know rate increase requests will be dissected in the news pages and mocked in commentary. That may be why the huge White House-shaped cake got to stay, […]
What a world this is, what a country. That’s today’s controversial opinion, based on local news articles and a national item. Those pieces from last week come to mind the morning after massive health-care legislation passed the U.S. House, where opposition spanned from principled and reasonable to name-calling. Two Northwest Arkansas reporters last week reviewed […]
The wonderful thing about having a well-run auditorium in town is opportunities it provides. If you follow Paul Simon or were listening to pop music in the mid-1980s you know of his album Graceland, which introduced to the West the South African men’s chorus that was in Fayetteville last weekend. Its name can seem a […]
A nice thing just happened. On Jan. 31, I was elected vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I’ve been a card-carrying columnist since 1991, joining during the run of my column Mirthology, in the old Arkansas Democrat. The post is interim, to cover after a resignation, until the annual membership meeting in […]