On the night of May 28, while the city of Minneapolis was on fire, Dawn Frederick noticed that looters had broken into a gas station on her block. Understandably, she called the police. Unfortunately, she tweeted about calling the police.

Does anyone remember when Kim Jong-un, the young and rotund Communist dictator of North Korea, died? I remember well, because it was only last month. As reported by respectable news outlets, death was all but certain, especially since Kim had not appeared at the obligatory celebration of his grandfather’s birthday in April. It’s also well known that the self-indulgent scion of his ruthless dynasty is morbidly obese and not in good health.

I’m old enough to remember a time when I didn’t start columns with “I’m old enough to remember.” When flower children roamed the earth, singing along with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, a song called “Woodstock” expressed their hope of humanity’s new dawn:

We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion-year-old carbon / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden.

We know how that turned out.

He appeared to have it all: youth, wealth, standing, pedigree. Sincere and pious, too: a credit to his nation. Still, he came looking and asking, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

What do you miss most about church during enforced isolation? It might be the socializing, or the preaching, or the excellent Sunday school series that was interrupted. 

I miss the singing. 

At the time I’m writing this, COVID-19 is officially a pandemic, folks are going cancel-crazy, and nobody knows how bad it will be. 

What will be the score a few weeks from now? I wish I could ask my future self if it’s safe to fly, or if the kids are back in school, or if the shelves are stocked with toilet paper and chicken soup again. Or if I’m struggling to breathe and someone I know is dead.

Most of us don’t think about architecture unless it slaps us in the face. That may say more about bland, blocky public buildings than we’d like to admit, but several years ago I was slapped by the central public library in a Midwestern university town. The entrance, opening to a four-story atrium, resembled an upended, corrugated, glass-and-aluminum Dixie cup. The main body of the building, constructed of native red granite, sloped slightly inward, decorated with random strips of window.