Rex Smith

I live in a great neighborhood – a place on the edge of a little city, where suburbia kind of meets the rolling hills of the Upstate countryside. It's not just the place we like, though; it’s the people, too.

My daughter is the latest in a line of fine tennis players in our family, so we have an annual end-of-summer dad-and-daughter tradition of spending a day at the U.S. Open. The other day we were on the phone together when early bird tickets went on sale, and within minutes we scored great seats. At one point, as we were looking at an online chart of Arthur Ashe Stadium, my late-Millennial kid asked, “I can’t imagine how you bought tickets before you had the internet.”

American history records some notorious criminals and ne’er-do-wells, but my favorite, who I learned about when I moved out west as a kid, might be a stagecoach robber on the frontier who was known as Black Bart.

You know what was fun about being a newspaper editor? Well, from my 30 years leading newsrooms, I might say a lot of things, but today I’m thinking in particular of this: picking the comics.

When we are young and struggling to figure out who we are, we sometimes try on labels and personas to see what fits. I was 19 years old, I think, when I was upbraided by an older and wiser fellow at my college – he was 21, and a philosophy major, for heaven’s sake, which I considered pretty exotic.

If you’re about to get eaten by a shark, you’re not going to be thinking about the need to preserve threatened ocean species, right? It’s the sort of dilemma that often confronts us: whether to focus on an immediate threat or a long-term dilemma.

My progressive friends are drawing some comfort from polls showing that Donald Trump’s popularity is dipping. He began this presidency with a higher approval rating than he ever had during his first term, but now Trump is even a lot less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his term four years ago.

Americans love their caps. Even folks who aren’t big baseball fans wear caps that signal their fandom of one product or another, or of a particular team. We like you to know right upfront, as soon as you face us, who we are.

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

There’s a silly Monty Python sketch from a half-century ago that some of you surely remember, and it spawned an enduring meme — though we didn’t have that name for it then. In the scene, a hapless character who is annoyed about being asked a lot of baffling questions complains, “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition,” at which point a trio of red-caped cardinals bursts into the room, with one exclaiming, “No-o-o-body expects the Spanish Inquisition!”