"To comfort the afflicted,
and afflict the comfortable."

"If a dog bites a man,
it's a story;
if a man bites a dog,
it's a good story."

"There is a touch of the poet in most revolutionaries—
and a touch of the revolutionary in most poets.
But among revolutionary leaders,
the finest poet—
And among poets,
the most successful revolutionary leader—
Has to be Mao Zedong,
who was born 100 years ago today."

"As much as we believe that
the Globe has been good for the city,
we also know
how good the city has been for the Globe."

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In a Front Page story titled "The Sermon: Creating Words to Live By," staff writer Sam Allis writes about the weekly challenge facing all preachers, creating a great sermon. He writes, "A sermon is an anomaly in the chaos of our lives; a profound idea wrapped in stillness, crafted and delivered with skill and care. It is the vertical in a horizontal world, the opposite of a sound bite. It honors the capacity of the congregation to absorb a message." In the article, Allis asks, "What is a great sermon?" He responds with a provocative chiastic question:

"Is it great because it is remembered
or remembered because it is great?"

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Kenneth Berman is chair of the litigation department at the Boston law firm of Sherin & Lodgen. He is also the former chairman of the Boston Bar Association's litigation section. In a Boston Sunday Globe article in September, 1998, Berman was quoted as saying:

"True statements are always legally accurate,
but legal accuracy is not always the truth."

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In a "Technology & Innovation" column (titled "Microsoft Jumps Into Gaming Fray"), columnist Hiawatha Bray examined Microsoft's upcoming venture into the computer gaming industry. About to launch the new Xbox home gaming platform, Microsoft was challenging the two established industry leaders, Sony and Nintendo. Recognizing that a major marketing and technology battle was about to take place, Bray wrote:

"I have never been one for those electronic fighting games,
but I'm always up for an electronic gaming fight."

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In a front-page article titled "For BBC's Cooke at 90, Reporting is Ageless," Kevin Cullen wrote of the legendary Alistair Cooke:

"Through more than a half-century of work that was
remarkable for its simultaneous simplicity and erudition,
Cooke became America's most admired Englishman
and England's best-loved American."

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In an article on gun control, Osha Gray Davidson, a writer and gun control advocate, offered this penetrating observation about the nation's number one gun lobby:

"Until recently people thought of
the NRA as a hunting and sporting group
that did a little lobbying on the side.
Now it's thought of as a lobbying group
that does a little hunting and sporting on the side."

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Just prior to the 1996 New Hampshire primary, Republican candidate Pat Buchanan accepted the resignation of one of his top aides, a man who on a number of occasions had reportedly shared the stage with members of the Aryan Nation, a known hate group. In an article by Robert A. Jordan, Alan Dershowitz was quoted as saying about Buchanan:

"There have been men close to power
with no extreme views,
and there have been men with extreme views
that were not close to power.
But we've never had a candidate with
such extreme views and so close to power."

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In an article on the Op/Ed page, syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne wrote that George W. Bush was sometimes advocating contradictory policies in his run for the White House. Talking about the "balancing act" of the Republican nominee for president, Dionne wrote: "Bush confirmed that he plans to win on sweeping themes, not specifics. And he'll happily ignore the contradictions when his themes collide." He concluded:

"Bush is trying to be an ideological conservative
Without seeming to be a conservative ideologue."

"Everybody is in doubt about whether President Johnson
is a conservative progressive or a progressive conservative,
and he is in clover."

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John Ellis says the Internet is rewriting the rules of customer service because of its ability to make customers feel important. Two recent experiences make his point. After joining the 401(K) plan of the Boston Globe Employees Association, Ellis signed over eight percent of his income to Putnam Investments, the fund's manager. Instead of a "Thank You" note to their new client, Putnam sent Ellis an off-putting note telling him his new PIN code. Ellis felt taken for granted and (understandably) miffed. At the same time, Ellis was in the market for a new car and found a new General Motors car-buying service on the web. Within days of expressing interest, he received seven e-mails from five dealers. One dealer in Long Island said he'd even drive a car up to Boston so Ellis could give it a test drive. The two experiences caused a dramatic "turnaround" in Ellis's thinking:

"A brand I thought was great—Putnam—
I now think is brain dead.
A brand I thought was brain dead—GM—
I now think is great."

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In her annual "Christmas Wish List" column, Bella English had a special wish for Massachusetts's governor and Boston's mayor:

"To Gov. Weld:
a heart, to go along with his brain.
To Mayor Menino:
a brain, to go along with his heart."

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In "The Blount Edge," an article on writer Roy Blount, Jr., Mark Feeney discovered that one of Blount's early intellectual heroes was the legendary American writer, A. J. Liebling. Feeney then piggy-backed on a famous Liebling line to write of Blount:

"Blount's preeminence among contemporary humorists
has for some time allowed him to boast
(even if he's too modest to)
that he can write funnier than
anyone who can write smarter
and smarter than anyone
who can write funnier."

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In 1998, David Remnick became the fifth editor in the 73-year history of The New Yorker. Remnick originally discovered the magazine as a youth in his dentist father's waiting room, and became enthralled by the publication. Hired as a staff writer in 1992, he produced over 100 byline pieces over the next six years. In 1998, the 40-year-old became the youngest editor in the magazine's history. In an article titled "The New Yorker's Boyish Wonder," Mark Feeney wrote:

"It was Storybook 101:
Boy meets magazine;
magazine gets boy;
boy gets magazine."

"Boy meets girl.
Girl gets boy into pickle.
Boy gets pickle into girl."

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In April, 1995, a "Special Hollywood Issue" of Vanity Fair magazine appeared on the stands, with a dramatic fold-out cover featuring ten lingerie-clad Hollywood starlets. In a "Literary Life" column, Mark Feeney offered this assessment of the cover:

"Fabulous babedom may never be the same.
It's prurience at its most ironic,
irony at its most prurient:
airbrushed decadence."

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Writing about sex education in our schools, Ellen Goodman noted a deep division between advocates of safe sex and abstinence (which she dubbed "the chastity curriculum" and "the condom curriculum"). Both approaches, however, reflect a pendulum swing away from the prevailing social atmosphere of a few decades ago. Goodman wrote:

"In the sixties and seventies,
we talked about pleasures and forgot about dangers …
in the 1990s,
we talk about danger and forget about pleasure."

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A 1991 Vanity Fair cover featured a very pregnant Demi Moore. Except for what Ellen Goodman called "two strategically placed hands" the actress was totally naked. In the photograph, Annie Leibovitz had juxtaposed sexuality and motherhood, two things that don't normally go together. Noting that Leibovitz had "captured and, uh, exposed a visual taboo," Goodman wrote:

"After all, a mother isn't supposed to be a sex object
and a sex object isn't supposed to be a mother
and where is Freud when you need him?"

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In an article on the Op/Ed page, regular columnist Derrick Z. Jackson revisited the issue of Black voters feeling disenfranchised in Florida's presidential election last year. He tied the disputed election to the current war on terrorism with this chiastic creation:

"It should not be lost to history that Bush
is going after the Taliban in the name
of democracy when he worked so hard
a year ago to ban the tally."

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In a Valentine's Day column, Jeff Jacoby writes with great fondness about the valuable lessons he learned from his parents, including this chiastic maxim from his mother:

"Love doesn't grow from
the things somebody else does for you.
It grows from
the things you do for somebody else."

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On the 25th anniversary of People magazine, Mark Jurkowitz examined the history of the publication as well as the issue that commemorated the occasion. About the special issue he wrote:

"The special 25th-anniversary edition of People
follows the magazine's formula of
'Extraordinary people doing ordinary things
and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.'"

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In 1994, Ric Kahn wrote a fascinating article on the tortured life and self-inflicted death of a former Boston undercover cop named Jeffrey Coy. Kahn offered this chiastic clue to Coy's ultimate despair:

"In the primordial undercover world,
Coy found his psyche stretched in a tug of war between
unsuspecting cops who believed he was a criminal
and the suspecting criminals who believed he was a cop."

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In a review of Annie Dillard's book, For the Time Being, Elizabeth Knies, a teaching fellow in the creative writing program at Boston University, wrote of Dillard:

"If one cardinal rule of writing is
to 'write about what you know,'
she made it her business
to know about what she wrote
and to describe it in fine detail."

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In a 1994 article titled "The High Cost of Rewards," Alfie Kohn wrote:

"The question we need to ask is not
'How motivated is this person?'
but 'How is this person motivated?'"

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In an article titled "As GOP field fills up, race for donors on," Michael Kranish points out that the schedule of presidential primaries in the year 2000 has been dramatically compressed. As a result, the pressure to raise money earlier than in previous years has affected current presidential hopefuls, especially among the Republicans, where as many as ten prospects are courting a donor base that, at best, could probably support only as many as three full-fledged campaigns. He also writes:

"Candidates are in a Catch-22 situation:
They can't raise money
unless they are shown to be credible,
and many can't prove they are credible
unless they raise a lot of money."

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In an article on adoption, Joyce Maguire Pavao, a family therapist and adoption specialist, was quoted as saying:

"Adoption is not about finding children for families,
it's about finding families for children."

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Writer and critic Katherine A. Powers offers her reflections and musings on a regular basis in the weekly feature, "My Back Pages." Early in 1997, she observed:

"The whole point of art, after all, is to make
the particular universal
and the universal particular—
while at the same time expressing the ambiguities
and complexities of the human condition."

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Chiasmus can involve the use of numbers as well as words or phrases, as this Bob Ryan line demonstrates:

"Padilla is a 1 with overtones of a 2,
while Travieso is a 2 with overtones of a 1."

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In a review of Linda Simon's A Life of William James, book critic George Scialabba offers this chiastic assessment of James:

"And although he was perhaps not
superhumanly charming or heroicically good,
it's hard to think of any among his fellow immortals
as charming as James who were also as good,
or any as good who were also as charming."

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As a nationwide coffee craze was sweeping the country, Ron Shaich (pronounced shake), the co-chairman of Au Bon Pain, offered this observation in a 1994 Globe article on a possible "coffee war" in the Boston area:

"In the rest of the country, Dunkin' Donuts is perceived
as a bakery with a coffee shop attached,
but in Boston it's perceived
as a coffee shop with a bakery attached."

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During the 1998 impeachment hearings, David M. Shribman, the Globe's Washington Bureau chief, noted that the growing support for impeachment among House republicans was occurring "at the very moment of a serious leadership vacuum on Capitol Hill," with no one really in charge. Speaker Newt Gingrich had resigned, but hadn't yet formally left his office, and Robert Livingston had been selected as the new Speaker, but hadn't yet assumed the role. He made his point with this observation (note the two separate examples of chiasmus):

"Often, drifters and the dissolute say
they're between jobs.
The problem with the House speakership is the opposite:
The job is between people.
Gingrich has the job but can't exercise its power.
Livingston has power but won't exercise it
because he doesn't have the job."

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Writing about John Glenn's return to the astronaut ranks at age 77, David M. Shribman observed:

"Glenn, who has led the life of his times,
is having the time of his life."

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In a 1998 piece on Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian coalition, David M. Shribman noted Reed's penchant for always wearing white shirts. Juxtaposing Reed's sartorial tastes with his political acumen, Shribman added:

"His shirts are hot white
and his mind is white hot."

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During the 1994 Olympic games, television critic Ed Siegel lambasted Connie Chung for her unprofessional interviews with Tonya Harding, the figure skater implicated in the attack on rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Chung's first TV interview with Harding was considered so laughably "soft" it was criticized by most observers, and even ridiculed by some. In a second Harding interview, Chung appeared deliberately provocative, causing Harding to end the interview prematurely. Her dramatic about-face seemed a transparent attempt to salvage her reputation as a tough interviewer. By contrast, Siegel couldn't help but recall how gallantly Jim McKay had covered the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli athletes. He wrote:

"ABC's Jim McKay was a sportscaster
who distinguished himself covering a news story …
CBS' Connie Chung was a newswoman
who disgraced herself covering a sports story."

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In a "Living/Arts" article entitled "Difficult Transition from Crane to Thane," critic Ed Siegel reviewed a new production of "Macbeth," with Kelsey Grammer of the hit TV sitcom "Frazier" in the lead role. Siegel noted that Grammer has had classical training and asks, "How easily, then, does Grammer move from Crane to Thane?" In answering the question, he says, "At the end of this two-hour freight train of an adaptation, the issue remains Grammer and the vagaries of celebrity rather than Macbeth and the vagaries of power." And then he adds:

"Or to put it another way,
Grammer doesn't quite rise above the adage that
you can take the boy out of Frazier,
but you can't quite take Frazier out of the boy."