The afternoon sun is hot on the boathouse roof. I lie down for a nap with my son and can almost feel the heat penetrating the shingles. There is little wind and a haze over the lake muffles the sounds – all but for the lazy call of a Phoebe. I love these hot summer days when time seems to drip, slowly, in rhythm to the waves lapping at the dock. I have asked our columnists to write about time – the most valuable thing we have. I wonder how each writer will tackle it? I suggested they...

Like so many men, I am not a very good listener. I know this to be the case because my wife has pointed it out on many an occasion. There's something people just don't seem to understand: while I realize that what you have to say to me may seem important to you, what I have to say to you is always much much more important, and that is what we should all be focused on. Life would be so much easier if everybody just accepted this. Instead, people are always telling me things I really don't care to...

So, the fish are disappearing from the sea (is 2048 the new 1984?) and Canada’s carbon footprints on the earth are 10 times what they should be for sustainability. When (and if) Saddam Hussein’s death sentence is carried out, he’ll likely take thousands of other Iraqis with him. Big thinkers like Thomas Homer-Dixon (in his new book, The Upside of Down), think that if we are to avert social/political/ecological catastrophe, it’ll be narrowly, and require a lot more political and ...

It was the tail end of the holi- day season. My daughter,knowing that Bill Clinton is the man I love to hate, had given me the perfect gift for the season of goodwill — “The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House.” The author, Barbara Olson, had completed revision of the manuscript only days before she died in the hijacked jet that slammed into the Pentagon on September 11. Olson and I had only one thing in common — a loathing of the Clintons. She beca...