Julia Keller

Some people read tea leaves to know the future. I read David McCullough. Just after the acclaimed popular historian published "Truman" (1992), his splendid biography of the Everyman president whose...

I am thinking maybe DeLillo. Yes: Don DeLillo would work. DeLillo is the novelist who could etch glass with his diamond-sharp observations about America, the bedside visitor who heard the...

The chord changes in John Hartford's "Gentle On My Mind" aren't difficult for a good guitarist -- C, Dm7, G7 and C, for starters -- but for me and my...

Dropped from a height of, say, 3 feet, a copy of James Joyce's "Ulysses" would do some damage: The hefty tome could crush a bug, startle a pup or sting...

My father taught mathematics for many years at a small public university. He had to endure the usual office politics -- a pigheaded dean here, a petty tyrant of a...

A certain friend enjoys chiding me about the fact that I cover the "culture beat." He arches his eyebrows and utters the words out of the side of his mouth,...

MORNING Behold the fried egg, over easy: the bright yellow center encircled by a whitish aureole, terminating in a crispy brown edge. Behold the towering stack of wheat toast. These...

You've got to hand it to "Shrek" -- although if you do, expect it to come back shredded and soggy, since ogres are apt to look upon anything as a...

Glimpsed and gone. That is the ruthless, headlong essence of every photograph: things looked this way once -- but no more. Hovering at the edge of any photograph is a...

Let us take a moment this morning to honor the memory of Clifton Hillegass, the man who saved millions of students -- less poetically, millions of students' rear ends --...