Against Solidarity

As a writer, with a writer’s chronic need for detachment, I have avoided the ideology of gender

Urban Wild

In slowly gentrifying Detroit, you might see a fox, or even a coyote, but where have all the stray dogs gone?

A Jane Austen Kind of Guy

I get it that women find my affinity for their writer intrusive, but her world has much to offer men, too

Our Nuclear Future

We may think the bomb is back, but it never really went away

Dishonorable Behavior

The scourge of military sexual assault and the warrior’s masculine code

Reading Thoreau at 200

Why is the seminal work of the great American transcendentalist held in such scorn today?

My Mongolian Spot

An ephemeral birthmark is a rare gift, connecting me to generations spanning the centuries

Things Sweet to Taste

Much to my regret, I never truly knew the woman who helped raise me

Goodbye to Westbrook Acres

As a writer walks and muses, the world’s sorrows intrude upon the peaceful streets he will be leaving

A Brief History of Secession

Why Calexit might not be as crazy as you think

Asteroid Hunters

The scientists and engineers who defend our planet day and night from potentially hazardous space rocks

Tiger Mom

At a forest preserve in India, a writer sees the world anew and learns how to focus her son’s restless mind

American Carthage
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Echoes from the ancient conflicts between Hannibal’s city and Rome continue to reverberate well into the present

Lessons From Harlem
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A white blues player’s streetside education

Maximalisma
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A professor endeavors to separate treasure from trash—before her children have to do it for her

Raspberry Heaven
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A yearly back-yard harvest opens a door to the divine

In the Matter of the Commas
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For the true literary stylist, this seemingly humble punctuation mark is a matter of precision, logic, individuality, and music

The Fair Fields

Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

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