I originally read Sherwin B. Nuland’s book How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter in 1995 when I was in my mid-forties and my mother was dying of congestive [...]
Gerry Frank has made an estimate of the number of beats his heart has pumped over his 68 years — 3,771,800, give or take a few thousand. Dick Felton is [...]
OMG! What a bad, bad man Theodore Roosevelt was! I mean, like, golly, he basically ruined the entire 20th century…..and he died in 1919, well before the century really got [...]
I want to talk about eyes. But, first, I want to thank Babbette Hines for the way she’s put together this quirky look into human nature, her 2002 book Photobooth. [...]
Midway through Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel Things Fall Apart, the central character Okonkwo is getting a dressing-down from his aged uncle Uchendu. Okonkwo has been sulking in deep despair because [...]
The baby crawled along the carpet in open area in the back of church. She was dressed in a celebration of white and red horizontal stripes, and she was happy. [...]
As originally conceived in 1983, The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk was probably a bit too cute. Performance art runs that risk — that risk of coming across as a [...]
If you’re a teacher, you never know how something you do or say is going to affect one of your students — how a phrase or an idea may embed [...]
Years ago, when I was maybe 14, I ended up in a 16-inch softball game on a big field behind Austin High School on the Far West Side. It was [...]
Aunt Julia lived a counter-cultural life. That’s her in the 1985 photo above, walking on a wood plank over a small stream far up north in Minnesota. Hard to believe [...]