Abraham Lincoln passed his last hours in a cramped back bedroom in a boardinghouse across the street from Ford's Theater, mercifully unconscious, folded awkwardly onto a bed too short for him, laboring to breathe. A …

 
Osama bin Laden is in heaven.
Upon his death, bin Laden went to heaven, as he'd expected to, a warrior of righteousness claiming his longed-for reward. An archangel escorted him to a large, lavishly appointed salon, …

I live close to Green-Wood Cemetery. I like it there, walking around in all the stories.
Long ago, the stories went right onto the headstones. One young man — I'll call him "Martin V.B. Thompson," though …

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and known, without moving the curtain to look outside, that it had started snowing?Maybe you'd had a bad or strange dream, or your child …

The evidence that Don is an angel is compelling, provided you're inclined to believe it in the first place: his date of "birth" is September 11; he appeared when I needed him, and withdrew (to …

It's funny, the things we believe — the reasons we have for believing those things. I read far too many ghost stories growing up, and I did said growing up in an old house which …

Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
We've told our stories of that day a hundred times, a thousand times: where we were, what we did, with whom, how. It's not rehearsed; it's just …

Four years. A college career. A presidential term.
After a year, two years, even three, a moment, an event is still close at hand, in use, unfiled, but after four years, it's crossing over — from …

It's still here. Things still happen on it. You've got a friend's birthday party written in it, and another friend's wedding. You know that a whole day can't go anywhere, really, but it seems like …

At the time of year when the summer falls back and the fall verges forward, the two seasons leave a space between them in my head for all the years before. If a single madeleine …