Here are two headlines from the New York Times in the past two months:   “Kids Can’t Learn Who Can’t See” (May 15, 2015, an opinion piece promoting early vision care)   “Blind to a Child’s Obesity” (June 16, 2015, about parents who

The gulf in experience between Grandma Spratt and me is captured in two words from her letter of July 18, 1977: “at Wisconsin.” She lived in the town of Darlington, England. When I was four, my parents, brother and I, who were all born there, moved

  Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?   —Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”   I concluded the “Cathedral Town” essay I posted just before our (my first) trip to

A+. The grade I gave myself in the friendly confines of Fox Television for my performance as president; equivalent to my Wharton MBA. See “Fox Television”; cf. “Wharton.”   Attorney General. My personal lawyer. See “personal lawyer”; cf.

1 Bonnie and I were close my freshman year of college, her senior year at a neighboring women’s college. She came from a traditional military family and had traveled around the world, not just with her family—in fact, mostly on her own. My feelings

Reading Yukio Mishima’s novel, Runaway Horses, about failed Samurai rebellions in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan, has caused me to look at ISIS from a safe distance. In both cases, the ideology is violent and the premature deaths of its