When I was in the 4th grade, I went from being a good student to being a dunce.  For some reason, I couldn’t master long division.  I fell to the bottom of the class in my teacher’s eyes and in my self-esteem.  The harder I tried, the more my frustration grew, ending in fear. 

Before I took my seat on the county board of commissioners, my predecessor was famous for saying, “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.” In my experience, he and Mark Twain, to whom the quote is attributed, were wrong  After a year of the budget cycle,  I no longer believed

Institutions of higher learning like to advertise that a college education can add a $1 million to a student’s  lifetime earnings.   Lured by that promise, students blindly assume debt that can last a lifetime.  One thirty-year-old man, who graduated with an MA in Literature, ca

I once negotiated a labor contract while wearing my dress turned inside out.  I didn’t realize my mistake, but after we’d concluded our session, the negotiator from the opposite site of the table walked with me to the street. “Say,” he muttered as a motorcycle growled by, “

  Sometimes, I forget a web larger than the world-wide web exists.  You know the one I’m talking about. Nature, that place where every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  That place where a butterfly flaps its wings in Argentina and Japan suffers a tsunami.  To be ho

I might have told this story before.  If so, forgive me: While on a bus, touring France, my traveling companions and I stopped at a small café.  We’d been sitting for three hours, so  all twenty of us made a beeline for the toilets  the moment we disembarked. Confronted by two

Of course it’s true, the rich are different from you and me.  They have more money.  That aside, if you look closely into any tribe, you’ll find quirkiness.  The art world is no exception.  Where else but there would an expert who is in jail for art forgery, hold court with di

With colleges and universities touting their science and technology departments over humanities and the arts, a person could forget how much fun living the life of Indiana Jones (Click) can be — minus the poison darts, of course.  But it is possible to live the life if one has

During an In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)  segment of Public Broadcasting Service news (OPB),   Amanda Petrusich,  music critic for the New Yorker, spoke about the “outdated” notion that a work of art stands apart from the person who created it.  The theory is long-standing and k

Some friends invited me to see the movie Ocean’s 8.  The actresses are great, but I could care less about  females stepping into men’s worn-out roles.  Liberated women can do better. The last Ocean’s movie I saw starred the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawf