“…in the dark recesses of my soul I will always be a high school dropout.” So writes Bruce McCall, cartoonist for the New Yorker in his essay about the failure that has haunted him all his life. (“Confessions of a High School Dropout,” by Bruce McCall, Town&Country, 8/13

I admit to having curmudgeon blood in me. I inherited it from my father who always pulled his shirt above his head whenever anyone pointed a camera in his direction. My scrapbook is full of pictures of my father as a headless man.  Anyone who reads my blogs knows my Achilles heel is

Is the word manhole a sexist term? Maybe it is, but it won’t change soon as no one can come up with a better label. In the state of Washington, however, 40,000 words have been abolished from government documents to comply with a bill signed by Governor Jay Inslee. It bans gender-bas

“…perfect security at home without burdensome military engagements abroad” are the reasons our leaders are drawn to drone warfare, according to Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. (“Why Drones Fail, by Audrey Kurth Cronin, Foreign Affa

“Occupying is not the same as demonstrating,” observes Saskia Sassen, a sociology professor at Columbia University. She is making a distinction between recent public demonstrations against governments around the globe and those of the past. (“A Global Phenomenon: Squares That Ha

Some time ago, I received a reply to one of my blogs which was about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. The response came from a gentleman who had worked for Paul Wolfowitz when Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. The writer wanted to cor

It would be wonderful if editors of fly-by-night e-magazines developed some civility to compensate for their ineptitude. These presumed purveyors of literature might do well to meet the high standards they require of others. Below is one example of an editor’s clumsy instruction to

A metaphor, as everyone knows, is a comparison between a subject and an object. She was so tall I was reminded of a tree is one example. A simile draws the same comparison but uses the words like or as to make the connection obvious. She stood tall as a tree.  Poetic devices like the

A few days ago, I had lunch with a fundraiser from an Arizona university. She was in town scouting for dollars to endow a Chair for the school of engineering. Though I wasn’t in a position to provide that level of cash, she stopped by for lunch and over our curries, we talked about

“Anybody seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life.” So concludes a former duchess of Westminster, Loelia Lindsay, who extolled walking. She is quoted in an article about the virtue of being on foot by Mark Kingwell. (“Talking The Walk,” Harper’s June 2