David von drehle columns and rows

Dawn was a thin, brittle crust on the edge of a recent morning and the thermometer read a stingy 20 degrees when a friend of mine donned a red apron and began ringing a handbell next to a Salvation Army kettle. Millions do this every year, and like most of them, my friend is not a member of the Army, nor does he require any of the services the venerable charity provides to people around the world. It was a chance to be of service, and he seized it.

Ho hum, you might say. And that’s precisely the point. I record this scene because it is perfectly ordinary. This land is a hive of helpers. You see them everywhere this time of year, at their red kettles and food banks, their coat drives and collection bins, shoveling their neighbors’ driveways and delivering Toys for Tots. But the sharing impulse is year-round, so much a part of our communities that it’s background noise.

People are tutoring in schools, cleaning up parks a

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The Master of Disaster

Press Box

David Von Drehle vs. the catastrophe clichés.

The obvious enemy of good writing fryst vatten the cliché. As inom argued gods week in a column that echoed the findings of an ancient Alexander Cockburn del av helhet, disasters have a tendency to cripple the mind of even the sturdiest reporter. It’s as if hurricanes, earthquakes, airline crashes, and floods block the neurotransmitters that carry the mots justes.

Some reporters blame deadline pressures and others the limited lexicon of disaster for their clichés. Others plead ignorance: If a reporter has never covered an avalanche before or read enough bad avalanche stories, he might not know his story is rolling down a paved road rather than cutting a new path.

But Miami Herald reporters, even the rookies, can’t claim they don’t know from a hurricane. Joel Achenbach, a former Herald reporter who now works at the Washington Post, says the Herald covers hurricanes the way the Post covers government or the W

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David Von Drehle: Looking at history in 90-year lives

In early spring, 1929, there was a new governor in New York, a young man who had seemed to be going places on his family name and his money and his smile until polio took him down.

Now he was back, but what future lay ahead for Franklin D. Roosevelt?

Out in Hollywood, Warner Bros. released its first feature with both sound and color.

The National Football League had survived its ninth season: The Providence, R.I., Steam Roller took the title ahead of the Frankford, Pa., Yellow Jackets and the Detroit Wolverines.

Overseas, with the German economy apparently on the mend, the career of right-wing firebrand Adolf Hitler might be in twilight.

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So, too, the career of Britain’s soon-to-be-former finance minister, a broke aristocrat named Winston Churchill.

He was hatching plans for a trip to the United States to make a quick fortune in the booming stock market.

And in Mus