“For despite what its champions may assert, the short story doesn’t always demand the most from literary writers; instead it can coddle their weaknesses.” Laura Miller in an excellent overview of the modern short story.

My latest short story, Alison, published in the debut issue of Ink Pot, is also online here.

Why George Steinbrenner ruins the fun of baseball. “Some people will feel like we went out and won games and that was success,” Stottlemyre said. “Some people will feel like we got into the World Series and that’s successful. And there are some people that think that if you don’t win the whole thing, sometimes… Continue reading

Could the next pope be an Austrian? John Allen reports: Also Oct. 17, CNN conducted an interview with Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, who became a cardinal Oct. 21, and I was invited to tag along. Given that Venice produced three popes in the 20th century (Pius X, John XXIII and John Paul I),… Continue reading

A superb piece in this month’s First Things by Father Martin Rhonheimer, hardly a card-carrying member of the James Carroll branch of Catholicism, about the Church and Pius XII’s indifference to the fate of the Jews during the Hitler era: “…the astonishing fact that no Church statement about Nazism ever mentioned Jews explicitly or defended… Continue reading