Was there a horse story in your childhood? My wife Anne cherished Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, C.W. Anderson’s The Blind Connemara, and Marguerite Henry’s Stormy and White Stallion of Lipizza. When she wasn’t reading about horses, she was riding them. In the saddle by the time she was in elementary school, Anne rode both English…

With few exceptions, most of the new people I meet cringe perceptibly when I inform them that I teach high school freshmen. “Better you than me,” they might say. Or, “God bless you. That must be so difficult.” I think that the assumption that underlies that response is that teenagers must be terribly difficult to…

Sometimes with my Christmas cards I include a favorite seasonal poem. So consider this post a greeting card for the season. First, I can’t resist sharing the poem that has been my meditation this Advent. I always treasure Advent’s special spirit of hushed longing. This year I’ve found it expressed in a poem not written…

[Note: This post contains a spoiler for the film Melancholia in the last paragraph.] Sometimes it sidles up to you, out of the corner of your eye. You catch a glimpse and turn your head: Was that it? Nah. Like a mouse scurrying around that we don’t accept as an actual rodent until the fifth…

For reasons both practical and spiritual, I’ve mostly resisted the consuming pull of the sexual abuse saga at Penn State. But with ubiquitous news feeds and family or friends always there to fill you in, not to mention my own curiosity, one tends to be better informed than one’s better intentions would have it. On…

My mother lives in a little yellow house on John Street in Whiting, Indiana, where the Chicago skyline looms across the northern edge of town, where British Petroleum’s refining towers, which flank the town’s southern edge, burn both night and day, their white eyes flaming through the rain that has made me late for my…

One of the most brilliant moments from any episode of The Office takes place in season four’s opening episode, “Fun Run.” Michael Scott (Steve Carell) has organized a 5K to promote rabies awareness (long story), and decides to prep himself for the race by eschewing water all day and consuming a double order of Fettuccine…

“When you like a woman, / you talk and talk. / One night you kiss. / Another night you fuck.” “After their tumult, as they quieted, / She breathed into his ear / The tunes she loved to sing.” “When love empties itself out, / it fills our bodies full. / For an hour we…

For months, my laptop has been quitting suddenly, flashing inscrutable error messages, and not allowing me to back up. I can be a sudden, spontaneous shopper—especially in the months leading up to my wedding—for shoes, soft sweaters, and a gorgeous silk kimono. But for items requiring a power switch and a price exceeding three digits?…

First of all, a slap on the casting team’s wrist: Never cast Emma “Hermione” Watson in a movie unless you intend for her to be the focus of our attention. Watson has that mysterious movie-star something—a presence that overrides all others. When she first appeared onscreen in Simon Curtis’s film My Week with Marilyn, I…