The News of the Year

"The real news of a year is what happens to us"

I didn’t send out holiday cards this year. I just wasn’t up to it. Do you need a photo of me and my kid in France? Drop by the house and I’ll show it to you on my phone. Oh, you don’t have my address? Then you weren’t going to get a card anyway.

I don’t share contemporaneous photos of my kid online, so here’s my favorite selfie of 2023. It was taken in St. Louis during my book tour.

But what I really want to share is a column my father published almost 40 years ago, on Jan. 2, 1985. It is technically copyrighted to what was then called The Sun and it is used here without permission because my dad fucking wrote it. Come and get me, coppers. ¹

As my father notes here, his father died Dec. 5, 1984. Thirty years and one day later, my father died. The Sun — technically now the Baltimore Sun, but those of us who grew up with the Sunpapers have trouble calling it that, it’s like calling Twitter something other than Twitter — re-published the column at my suggestion. But this screenshot is from the 1985 edition of the paper.

The bi-weekly column my father wrote was short, by literal design, fewer than 400 words IIRC. It had originally been known as “Notes and Comment,” but at some point it became eponymous. He won an ASNE award for commentary and he deserved a Pulitzer in my opinion. He did a lot with a small space and he often did it with humor. He worked at The Sun from 1965 to 1995, primarily as an editorial writer, but he also covered national political campaigns. We overlapped at the Sunpapers for six years, which was kind of cool, although I always feel obligated to note: I got my job at the Evening Sun by not disclosing who my father was.

This is my favorite thing that he wrote, although the one where he had the Founding Fathers sing “There is nothing like a dame” while noting they absolutely disapproved of giving women the vote is a close second. I read it every year and have a nice cry. This year, I also noticed how depressingly familiar the top stories are — a mass shooting (now we could have a top 10 list of just mass shootings), the U.S. economy, a chemical disaster, a woman’s historic candidacy that ended in defeat. Meet the New World, same as the Old World.

It’s a little sentimental, but so was my dad. While his favorite film of all time was Sweet Smell of Success, he also loved Strictly Ballroom. However, the film at which he laughed hardest, in my memory, was Albert Brooks’s Lost in America, particularly the scene in which the Brooks character quit his job in an angry tirade. The family had just gotten a VCR and my dad must have rewound that scene three, five times. Frankly, we were a little nervous about what was going to happen when he returned to work.

Anyway, Happy Holidays from me and my dad. Try to make someone in your life laugh today. Or, failing that, give them some really annoying career advice.

1. If you ever want to make me laugh really hard, all you have to say is “Not the livestock, George.”