On the last night of the last summer I spent at Camp Crowther, with college a week ahead, I walked out onto the promontory above my father’s cottage to watch the sun go down over the...

Hal Crowther, who won the Baltimore Sun’s H.L. Mencken Writing Award in 1992, is the author of An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken, published in October 2014 by...

The political climate, even at “the highest altitudes,” has taken a drastic turn for the worse since Mencken’s day. The blizzards of attack ads aimed squarely at the lowest common...

Cobb found the crack in the American psyche where athletic competition confuses itself with warfare, and he pushed until it was just wide enough to let him through.