By BRAD WARTHENEditorial Page Editor On a brilliant, warm February afternoon, I was holed up in a darkened booth in an Irish-themed pub talking local politics. Not exactly James Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,â€� but a reasonable Columbia facsimile.    Jack Van Loan was...

You know that event over the weekend I mentioned attending back here? It was a fund-raiser for Hand Middle School over at Gallery 701. And while a lot of folks did come up and converse with me about newspaper business, our dialogue was somewhat constrained by the fact that it was hard to talk over t...

    Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wa...

Just to briefly mention what I've been up to on this Ash Wednesday, we had a meeting this morning with representatives of Providence Hospital and Lexington Medical Center. They had come to jointly announce a major breakthrough -- they've stopped fighting over whether LexMed should be allowed...

Well, I saw something I've never seen before at my Rotary Club, to the best of my memory (and fellow Rotarians, correct me if I'm wrong): Our main speaker got THREE standing ovations -- before he started speaking, in the middle of his remarks, and when he finished. I've seen some war her...

One reason that I asked y'all to tell me how the economy was looking in your own lives is that if you work in the news biz, it helps to check with people who are not looking at what WE are looking at every day. When I talk about the economy, I'm perfectly aware that my own perception is colo...

Peggy Noonan had an intriguing column Saturday, about what she was seeing in Manhattan in terms of real, street-level effects of the recession. Here's an excerpt:     This is New York five months into hard times.    One senses it, for the first time: a shift i...

This previous post got me to thinking that some of you might be interested in traveling down memory lane a bit with regard to Sheriff Leon Lott, since he's recently become nationally famous. As y'all know, I feel a certain kinship for the sheriff (whom we endorsed in the last election). We c...

Looking for something else, I happened to run into this old story from 1991. It's from Leon Lott's Miami Vice days as head of the narcotics squad of the sheriff's department. As many of you will remember, back then Leon had a rep as a bit of a cowboy (in addition to Sonny Crockett, Dirty...

You know about all the budget cuts that have hit USC and other state institutions, but I was just talking to Caroline Whitson, president of Columbia College, and trying to operation a private college is no bed of roses these days, either. She had called me earlier in the day, and I got her back on h...