From the day
Perspective: The Anxious Local · Sight
The morning papers are a blur of black ink and dread, filled with those lousy headlines about Congress quarreling while our boys are still breathing in the mud. I squinted through the hazy autumn light at the station sign, my heart sinking to see gas has climbed to $0.15 a gallon again. Every shadow of a stiff wool coat or a tilted fedora on the sidewalk feels like a harbinger of more bad news from the front. Between the soaring costs and the talk of a diplomatic crisis, the world feels as fragile as a stack of Lincoln Logs ready to topple.