When historians study the inaugural addresses delivered by presidents either taking office or continuing in office, they look for memorable themes and phrases. Perhaps the most memorable — and the most tragic — was on March 4, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln spoke just before the end of the Civil War about putting things back together. …
In the course of nearly 25 years of school, I managed to come across some teachers with some odd gimmicks. In the mid ’70s, when I was trying to get my mojo back taking some junior college courses, I signed up for Sociology 101 and met a teacher who gave the final exam on the …
I wrote this about 10 years ago and came across it recently. I’m reposting it because it may have been the very best action I took in my entire career and it made a real difference in someone’s life. I wrote the other day about my two years in Greeley, Colorado, and what they meant …
I never understood the logic behind remaking movies. Oh, I understand it from a financial standpoint. If a movie is popular, then a remake of it has a built-in audience. And there is certainly a history of some great stories being told again and again in Old Hollywood — “Quo Vadis,” “The Four Feathers,” even …
The only way Jack Sawyer could have become more of a legend in Ohio State football would be if the play he made Friday night in the Cotton Bowl had happened against the School Up North. With Texas on the verge of scoring and tying the national semifinal game late in the fourth quarter, Sawyer …
What’s the very best thing about being alive? I’m not sure there is a bigger, more open-ended question than that, but I’m going to make it a little easier by eliminating an entire category. Just as Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people,” I’m going to ask the question without including interpersonal relationships. After all, …
So much sadness. I wrote yesterday that I was born in Southern California — San Diego, to be exact — and while I never really lived there as a child, I spent the first half of my life dreaming of returning to California to live someday. I lived there from 1990 to 2010, and the …
If there’s one thing that can be truly heartbreaking, it’s when people don’t even pursue their dreams. It’s one thing to go after something and not get it. It’s far different to decide you probably wouldn’t get it if you tried and then not try at all. I’m not really talking about myself. I got …
I loved living in California. I was born there in the last month of the 1940s, but my parents moved east to Chicago when I was a year old. I knew it was a bad idea and I tried to tell them. Of course I couldn’t get through to them because I didn’t know any …
“He who dies with the most toys, wins.” Why is that? Why do we turn everything into a competition, with winners and losers? Is enough ever enough? And what does it mean anymore to be free, particularly in terms of Americans and their rights? If we start with the Declaration of Independence, we believe that …
