September 9, 2026 It’s shaping up as a humdrum day in my job as Senate correspondent for the Voice of America. For lack of a better story I’ll probably cover a committee hearing on health care, a big issue in the USA, not so much for my audience overseas. I turn the car radio to… Continue reading Where I was and where we went wrong
Category: 2020 election
A face in the mob
January 5, 2022 Photo by Tyler Merbler / Wikicommons Years ago I knew a kid named Mark. We both belonged to the youth group at our Methodist church, and the summer after my senior year in high school, a bunch of us traveled to the Kentucky mountains on a service project, helping people fix up… Continue reading A face in the mob
A pandemic diary: Die hard, live longer
June 24, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9HO3_heuQ We just bought a fresh batch of N95s. We're not making travel plans. Takeout remains the order of the day (pun intended) and "eating in" means our own table. Actually, we often dine on the deck, looking out on a leafy street with bluebirds flying around and the temperature hovering in… Continue reading A pandemic diary: Die hard, live longer
The Capitol I knew
January 7, 2021 One afternoon in the summer of 1998 I was sitting in my cramped broadcast booth in the Senate Radio & TV Correspondents Gallery in the Capitol, where I spent my days reporting on Congress for listeners all over the world on the Voice of America. I had just filed a routine story… Continue reading The Capitol I knew
A pandemic diary: Of times and lives
November 13, 2020 Genealogy is fascinating for a lot of reasons, and I don't mean finding out that your ancestor stood with the embattled farmers at Lexington. (If all the people who claim their relatives were there on that day are telling the truth, the farmers would've outnumbered the redcoats by about a million to… Continue reading A pandemic diary: Of times and lives
A pandemic diary: Letter to younger self
October 16, 2020 You've probably heard of and maybe indulged in the exercise of writing a letter to your younger self. The idea is to take stock, reflect, set down the big lessons of the past, and promise to live by them in the future. That's all well and good, but I've already made a… Continue reading A pandemic diary: Letter to younger self