Pierre Tristam

In one video, Army Master Sgt. Joseph Myers walks unannounced into his 10-year-old daughter Hanna’s classroom in Texas after a long deployment. In split seconds Hanna’s expression goes from blank to shock to joy to meltdown. She barely manages to make it toward her father’s embrace. In another, at a Jacksonville Jaguars football game last […]

Even in the United States, land of diversity and individualism, there’s still nothing like race and ancestry to imprison you in other people’s dumbest assumptions and cruelest distortions. An American – American-born, American-bred, American-educated – is suspected of having committed the mass killing that resulted in the death of 13 people at Fort Hood on […]

I haven’t watched CBS’ “60 Minutes” in years. But it was one of those stories that stops you in your tracks: Medicare fraud is “a $60 billion crime.” Medicare is the $456 billion government health insurance program serving 46 million elderly Americans. Its credibility as a government-run program is at the heart of the health-care […]

There was the case of Milissa Holland, the Flagler County commissioner, who in June accused 81-year-old John Petyo of Palm Coast of making death threats. Petyo has a recent history of trespassing and mental-health issues. There was the case of 82-year-old Antonino Milian of Deltona, who in August was found dead in the woods of […]

You remember the e-mails five years ago. They were all the same, junking up our in-boxes with bullet lists of how great things were going in Iraq – the exact number of new schools built, the number of Iraqis happily employed, the number of cell phones beeping everywhere (including, presumably, those used to detonate roadside […]

Empires rise and fall on the strength of their kitty, not their guns. Spain in the 17th century, France in the 18th, Britain in the 19th – they each went bankrupt, exhausted from debt. With unsustainable trillion-dollar deficits projected through the next decade, is the United States going the way of its European forebears? If […]

The New Yorker’s Steve Coll was on assignment in Nigeria recently, dining alone “over spicy rice and cold beer” and entertaining himself with the letters to the editor in a local paper. One in particular, which Coll reproduced in his blog, recounts a man’s absurd run-in with cops. The man was carrying a bag. The […]

Here’s a good way to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing: Exceed that achievement with one of greater value. Going to Mars would be nice. Getting universal health care would be cheaper. It would do more good to millions of people than expeditions to outer worlds to pick up rocks and plant flags. […]

COMBATTING TYRANNY A twitter is a terrible thing to waste. Tweeting his brains out over Iran in the last few days, Marco Rubio, the former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and current candidate for U.S. Senate, had a “feeling” that “the situation in Iran would be a little different if they had a […]

There is no health-care debate in the United States. There’s not even a debate over principles. You’d think a nation intent on overhauling a broken system that presidents going back to Harry Truman have been trying to fix would want to openly discuss what it wants – universal care? Single-payer? A private-public combination? Nationalized insurance? […]

Last week, GM went bankrupt. Naturally, my wife, Cheryl, and I went to a GM dealership and bought a car. Her Buick was acting up. Strange sounds, twittery squeaks, leaks all over. We took it to the dealership for a look. It turned into a $2,700 sentence, before tax. I couldn’t tell you why. Mechanics […]