My passion for "A Prayer for Owen Meany."

Sometimes, things come into your life through serendipity.

How I ended up reading "A Prayer for Owen Meany" was this: After I graduated from college in 1995, I moved to Southeast Kansas to take a job at a small-town daily newspaper. One of my best friends from college, Brent Graber, was taking a gap year before grad school, so he moved in with me.

That probably saved my life. I was so alone, otherwise.

In any case, Brent enjoyed going to estate sales an picking up stuff cheap. And one time he picked up the "Owen" at such a sale.

When we were at home in the evenings, he read passages to me, laughing with delight. So when he finished, I picked it up and read it. And was smitten.

The first time I read "Owen Meany," I loved it because it was hilarious.

The second time I read "Owen Meany," I loved it because it let me know in a keen way that faith and doubt, that sacredness and profanity, often coexist.

The third time I read "Owen Meany," I closed the book, then handed it to the barista in the coffee shop where I was sitting and urged her to read it.

The fourth time I read "Owen Meany," the rage over 1980s politics seemed a bit dated — but I saw more of myself in the middle-aged narrator's disillusionment.

Will there be a fifth time? I don't know. Some books accompany you all the way through life, though. "Owen," for me, is one of them.

How I got cut from jury duty

I spent parts of two days in a Douglas County District Court last week, undergoing the tedious process of jury selection for a criminal trial. I'm pretty sure I know why I got cut, and I'm still a little bothered by it.

If you've never been through the jury selection process, it can be a pretty intense thing — the prosecuting and defense attorneys each have a crack at the jury pool, asking hours of questions designed to elicit your biases, and to send you home if your biases are too overt. Lots of personal information gets shared, sometimes tears are shed, and it's all a very intense way to spend time with a few dozen strangers.

It's also, less obviously, a preparation for trial and the types of arguments that both sides will make. The lawyers, in picking a jury, are walking a tricky line: They want to get rid of overtly biased jurors so that they can conform to fair trial rules — but they also want to pick jurors who might be amenable to the arguments. So, not too biased but biased enough.

Which, I guess, is where I come in.

My passion for U2's "Rattle and Hum"

The first album I was ever intimate with was U2's "Rattle and Hum."

By intimate, I don't mean "liked" or "loved." What I mean is this: The cassette tape was a constant presence in my stereo for the better part of a year in the late 1980s. I played it in the car, I played it in my room, I played it over and over and over again, singing along with — emulating — Bono's wails and snarls over and over again so much that even now, 30 years later, I can still perform much of the album if it suddenly appears on a sound system within earshot. Like Bono, I no longer hit the high notes quite so effortlessly, and the Gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" resonates now, in my forties, in ways it didn't when I was a teenager. But still.

It may seem odd that "Rattle and Hum" inspired this passion in me; it was U2's prior album, "The Joshua Tree," that launched the band into the pantheon of rock gods, and the follow-up live album — if I remember correctly — was judged a lesser effort. But you don't fully decide what music you find or finds you, especially in rural Kansas in the late 1980s, and the album's release in 1988 coincided with my sophomore year of high school. I was ready to be smitten with so much about life, and musically, "Rattle and Hum" immediately became what I loved most.

It's possible the competition wasn't really there. Again, I lived in rural Kansas during the pre-Internet age. It's possible I might've heard of bands like, say, the Pixies, and I remember a skater friend had a copy of an early Red Hot Chili Peppers, but my high school years were dominated by hair metal, Young MC, and this new guy named Garth Brooks. Later, I would envy friends who spent those same years listening to the Smiths. I'd never heard of them.

Next to "Cherry Pie," U2 seemed deep and authentic and they sang in overt ways about Christian concepts that, at the time, I'd only heard from Christian bands. At the time, too, Bono's perpetual smug righteousness - a trait he's carried forth into late middle-age - wore much better when he was in his 20s and I, a teen, was finding what I cared about. Yeah! Killing Martin Luther King Jr. was wrong! Apartheid is bad! Albert Goldman is an unethical book writer!

Some of the causes have aged better than others.

Two other good memories of the album: My senior year in college, taking a long road trip with my college band, and singing the album at the top of my lungs with Mike Yutzy. And a group of friends "borrowing" the college's digital projector to show the concert movie of the same name on the side of a dormitory.

I put the album on over the weekend for a short roadtrip — "Rattle ahd Hum's" running time being equivalent to about the length of a quick turnpike run between Emporia and Lawrence, Kansas. When "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" ended, my son offered a slow, sarcastic golf clap.

Punk.

I guess my passions won't be his, which is fine. I won't be 15 again, which is mostly good. But it was good to rediscover the album, to rediscover my Bono impression. I still haven't found what I'm looking for, either, but "Rattle and Hum" puts me a little closer to locating it.

Are college kids the biggest threat to free speech?

No. But I think Atrios is missing something with this:

The obsession of our pundit class with elite college generally, and specifically the idea that lefty college kids are the greatest threat to free speech ever known to man, is completely bizarre. I know that sometimes well-meaning college kids can be dumb. They are 19! They also don't have any power. Sure everybody can have a bit of power over someone or something for a moment, but structurally...college kids have no power. Even Harvard kids. The $30 billion endowment has power.

Our pundits punched hippies when they were in college (show me where the hippie hurt you, Jon) and they can't stop punching them now. It's so weird.

I suppose I'm one of the hippie punchers in this scenario. But here's the thing: College is a place one goes to learn habits of mind and habits of how to act on the ideas of what your mind generates. The students in college will, in not too long, be the folks running our offices and our states and our nation, and if they're developing censorious habits of mind that they'll take forward with them into that future, that is of concern.

That's to say nothing of that fact that colleges are supposed to be the areas of our society where inquiry and expression is most free. "Academic freedom" has covered a multitude of sins over the years - and rightfully so. When those zones of freedom become clogged by the censorious instinct, it leaves the rest of us with a reduced chance to fight for expression.

Is it important compared to President Trump threatening to investigate the press? Probably not. But it still matters, and remains worthy of comment.

Is late night supposed to be fair and balanced?

I understand that late night talk shows are more overtly political — liberal, really — than they were two or three years ago. Still, I find it kind of odd that there seems to be a real push for both "balance" and comprehensiveness of coverage, mostly from the right.

This is becoming a regular thing:

Discussions of balance and story choice make sense where the news media — especially media that presents itself as attempting objectivity —are concerned. But these are comedy shows, and most comedy has a point of view. Do they owe the audience (or a portion of the audience) to address certain topics?

This isn't a defense of Harvey Weinstein. I just think this "make jokes about Harvey" push from the right is based on expectations that folks on the right don't get to have. Fair and balanced is for news — maybe — but it's a silly, unrealistic expectation for a comedy routine.

Maybe the New York Times really does have it in for Hillary Clinton

Great piece by the New York Times about Harvey Weinstein's decades-long pattern of sexual harassment, but the Times makes one editorial choice I find weird and even a little upsetting.

It uses this picture with the story:

It's worth noting, of course, that Weinstein is connected to and moves among powerful figures. Yet this photo feels ... unnecessary. It's not the picture of Clinton with him that bothers me. It's the picture of Clinton laying her hands on Weinstein, who we are learning in this story is a serial sexual harasser. The combination of the two factors makes the picture look like something that it's not.

I'm not one to obsess about the Times and its treatment of Clinton. I think her emails and Clinton Foundation practices were fair game for inquiry - and hell, I supported her during the primary season. This feels unnecessary, though. A little bit like piling on. Ick.

21 things I think about guns.

I believe that guns are tools made for the explicit purpose of killing.

I think that sometimes, unfortunately, killing is necessary.

I think that even when necessary, killing is morally fraught and not to be entered into lightly.

I think the act of owning a gun is a signal to the world you have determined you can trustworthily decide when killing is correct. I think that’s … kind of extraordinary. I think I do not possess that sensibility myself.

I think that even if I wanted to make gun ownership illegal, it would be impossible to do, politically, in America.

I think I grew up in Kansas, around good people who possessed guns safely and with respect for life.

I think I lived eight years in Philadelphia, around good people who feared for their lives because of guns.

So.

I think that firearms education - like the hunter safety classes of my Kansas youth - should be available wherever access to guns is available.

Which is to say, just about everywhere.

I think that the right to bear arms is not completely unfettered, because no right is.

I think part of the anguish about the gun debate, on one side, is a fear that government is going to come and take everybody’s guns away.

I think part of the anguish about the gun debate, on the other side, is that that fear seems to block even modest and incremental regulations that might create more safety for Americans at large.

I think, for example, that there are many obstacles to passing laws that require owners to report missing and stolen guns. Even though this seems to be the very essence of responsible gun ownership, and even though one study indicates eight in 10 gun crimes are committed using guns that were illegally possessed by somebody other than the other.

I think one could pass a law like that, make America a little safer, and nobody’s legitimately obtained gun would’ve been seized by the government. So I think I don’t understand why the opposition to something like that is reasonable.

I think that mass killings like the one in Las Vegas weirdly work for the NRA types, because they can challenge any reasonable regulation offered afterward with: “How does this stop (insert mass killing here)?”

And I think a sufficient answer should be: “We don’t know that it would. But here’s the reasoning this regulation might reduce killings overall.”

I think people who offer such regulations should be prepared to discuss that reasoning in detail.

Finally, I think the NRA is not magic. They spend a lot, yes, but not infinitely on lobbying and political contributions. They’re effective because they have a committed constituency - one, by the way, that isn’t necessarily reflective of the broader gun-owning population. The NRA wins because the NRA’s membership cares more than you do. They’re working even when gun regulations aren’t a top-line issue in our societal debate. They stay committed even during the fallow times. So if you want to do something, you are going to have to care more and organize your friends to care more.

I think that will be hard.

I think, ultimately, there’s room in this country for both gun ownership and a smarter regime of gun regulation.

But I think I don’t know if we’ll ever see it.