Walking home from the gym on a drizzly day-before-Thanksgiving, a swirl of white attracts my eye, tucked between the vertical 2x4’s bound across most every tree on my ever-under-construction street.

Two facts that encapsulate the callous — maybe even downright cynical — attitude that humans have toward actually addressing business-as-usual in the face of climate change. Dubai is hosting the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference this month. The same Dubai with an annual average daily high temperature of 91 degrees…

I understand. I mean, what’s a person to do? You’re tripping over the stuff on the bedroom, there’s boxes lining the hall, the attic is cluttered, the basement’s full, the garage hasn’t sheltered a car in twenty years, and both storage buildings are maxed out. You eye that plastic fountain…

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. It made me uncomfortable. I felt his anger and frustration. I realized that I never would, could, experience such alienation. I live in a world that’s powered by people like me, for people like me. I’ve never considered that fair, though…

“In a broader sense, I know what happened to Iishea Stone: a luminous and extraordinary woman was failed repeatedly — by her family’s pathologies, by poverty, and by a social safety net that couldn’t seem to catch her, Had Iishea grown up with the advantages I had, she might have…

I received a message in today’s email: New Rep is closing its doors. This time for good. Forty years is a good long run for a theatre company. Still, I am so sorry to see the New Rep go.

Adrienne LaFrance’s cover story “The New Anarchy” (The Atlantic, April 2023) provides an historical perspective on the nature of violence in our country and how it cycles through history. This particular passage, centered on the early 20th century anarchist Luigi Galleani, resonated with me: The conditions that make a society vulnerable to political violence are complex but well established: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it. All of those conditions were present at the turn of the last century. All of them are present today.

Three of my favorite stories these days fall under the label ‘YA:’ Young Adult. Perhaps I’m regressing. Perhaps I’m catching up to a genre that did not own a label back when I was age-appropriate. Regardless, I love the exuberance, the freshness, the ‘everything is critically important’ intensity that YA…

A few years ago my sister, who is both straightforward and accurate, called me a curmudgeon. It smarted for a moment, until I realized the truth in the label. Since then, whenever I careen in the direction of being another eccentric old fogie, I catch myself for a moment. Then…