Beat poet Jack Kerouac wrote, “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.” 

Early in this decade I produced a column of jokes for a WORLD issue each April at income tax filing time. I fell out of practice, but one reader last month said he would need some humor when contemplating election results—and that week, providentially, I picked up a new book, Wit’s End by James Geary, and also received from a playwright friend, Kenan Minkoff, some of his unpublished humor.

Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: How I Left the Right (Liveright, 2018) is the sad tale of a former Wall Street Journal op-ed page editor driven to despair by Donald Trump and his final acceptance by GOP leaders: Boot is now a man without a party. He accurately points out Trump’s character problems and attacks “Trump toadies.” But Boot leans over so far to discount the threat on the other side that he describes Hillary Clinton as “resolutely centrist” and applauds “the Clintons’ moderate views.”

Thanksgiving month: A time to celebrate pioneers who came to America, natives who were hospitable, and the sweet land of liberty that resulted.

The immigration debate rages hot, and here are three columns (from 1994, 2002, and 2008) from the WORLD Magazine vault that I wrote in relation to that debate. I don’t at all minimize the concerns many Americans have in regard to radical Islamists or MS-13 gangsters in our midst. I would like to suggest that our basic predisposition should be pro-immigration for historical, sociological, and theological reasons.

Several readers have asked me what I think of Steven Pinker’s best-selling Enlightenment Now (Viking, 2018). They could have asked Bill Gates, who called it his “new favorite book of all time.” They could have asked The New York Times (“a terrific book”) or Publishers Weekly (“heartening”). But they asked me, so I’ll give them my opinion: It’s partly true materially, and nuts spiritually.

Edmund Burke was a Whig member of the House of Commons between 1766 and 1794, when Great Britain became less great. He thought the American colonies had right on their side and Warren Hastings, the Trump-like governor-general of Bengal (India), deserved impeachment. (The House of Commons did impeach Hastings, but the House of Lords acquitted him.)

In short, given the political context of the time, many saw Burke as a progressive.

Bookstores now display literary efforts with titles like A History of the World in 6 Glasses—and I’m up to a challenge. Here, in honor of the splendid 2018 major league season, is a history of helping the poor in America in terms of three ballparks.