Doors are Killing Our Kids, Along with Books, Tables, Chairs… (or) The Answers to School Shootings Are Right in Front of Us “There are too many entrances and too many exits to our over 8,000 campuses in Texas. There aren’t enough people to put a...
If a Cheerio rolls under the refrigerator, I think I’d stick my hand under to get it out. It’s scary what’s under a fridge, believe me. And I’m human. But I wouldn’t hesitate. I see it all the time from my sky box at Yankee Stadium. A foul...
The morning after we cast our votes, informing them by simple majority, in the Electoral College, and in truth that our liberty has had enough of being diminished, grabbed, fondled, ridden roughly, and otherwise abused to great delight of the tax...
Checklist sharpied on the inside lid of a hatbox This crèche will make nothing happen when you take the fourteen parts from the hatbox and unwrap the news of ‘42 covering 1) the manger made of tongue depressors given to Grandmother as a small...
Why Are You Always So Angry? Because your soul turned out to be soil. Because your wonderful is a wind drill. Because you surprised me with sulfide. Because you hiss like melting steel. Because instead of a case of tuna, you brought home a case of...
This is a follow-up to Roxana Robinson’s earlier essay, “Trump & the Criminal Culture” If you ran a company, would you offer a product that would kill nearly half your customers? How good a business model is that? If you’re...
Standing before a table heaped with avocados, I watched the other shoppers toss bags of potatoes, onions, and apples into their carts. I was alone in my pursuit of just the right green-black fruit. When I found it, it wouldn’t last more than a day...
At five a.m., there was a bold flash of light and then a tremendous roar of thunder. Car alarms sounded throughout the neighbourhood. An early riser, I stood on the front porch, gazing into the dark as the rain began to batter the sidewalks. It is...
Heroism? Duty? Selflessness? Responsibility? Christian kindness? I’d love for any one of those to be true. I’d love to feel like a hero. But they aren’t and I’m not. I became a nurse because I flunked out of art school and needed a vocation. My mom...
When the first corona cancellations started appearing in my inbox, I wrote to my monthly creative writing workshop, pledging to scrub every surface of our meeting space in order to provide a germ-free place for us to gather. I didn’t want to cancel...
I am lying on my couch, watching the lights come on in Hanoi from the window of my 33rd floor apartment. Phone in hand, I alternately scroll through headlines about the devastation coronavirus is wreaking on the USA, and search for updates about...
On Monday, I drive six hours from North Carolina to Atlanta to pick up my son Sam from his university. On Tuesday, we prepare to drive back, shoving into our car his entire dorm room—electronic piano, ratty sheets, plastic stackable drawers, boxes...
Arrival February 10, 2020 I landed in Guangzhou to a newly polished, eerily silent, cavernous airport from my vacation in Vietnam. As I watched a middle-aged man carefully polishing an already gleaming section of marble wall, the feeling crept up on...
The photograph showed a new kind of behavior in the Oval Office: Donald Trump was using the body in a way that was unusual for a U.S. president. On his second day in office, the new Commander in Chief was demonstrating his physical domination of the...
