In one of the most anticipated plays of the season, Tom Hanks stars as Mike McAlary, a writer who worked his way to stardom at three New York tabloids from 1985 to 1998. Beneath its nostalgic surface—the foul-mouthed newsroom repartee, wafting cigarette smoke, and late nights at the bar—the play poses serious moral questions about journalism and its place in the quest for celebrity.

A Friend Remembers Dorothy Day

As a boy in Oklahoma, poet John Berryman had served each morning at the early Mass with Fr. Boniface, the two of them up there by the small pre–Vatican II altar, intoning the Latin together. But with the death of his father, his other Father, the one to whom he had prayed, also seemed to withdraw, receding into the shadows of literature. 

Pawan Sinha is a neuroscientist at MIT. His special interest is visual learning and how the brain recognizes what it sees. Many scientists stay inside their laboratories and study their data. And God bless them. They make important discoveries, and some of them even change the way we live. But Pawan Sinha isn’t one of those. 

Could the vogue for Herbert McCabe portend a renaissance of liberation theology and the revolutionary spirit of the ’60s? His admirers have not linked his Catholic faith and his socialist politics, and McCabe himself denied an intrinsic connection. Still, there exists a bond between his theology and his radicalism, a bond particularly worth examining today. 

This book is sensible, judicious, well written, and filled with aptly chosen quotations, from Newman himself, and from friends and foes alike.