The Editor’s Desk

A perilous predicament: As we worry that our written language is being degraded by fractured modes of digital communication, there has never been a time when more people thought of […]

Gabe Silverman died over the weekend. If you never met him, it’s your loss, but if you hung around the Downtown Mall much, you probably did. He was a real […]

A reader recently called what I do in this column “simple-minded pablum.” Another reader, maybe I could even call him a fan, called it “an interpretive ethnography of our own […]

When I stepped outside Saturday morning, buzzards were roosting in a bare tree at the back of the yard. The plants had frozen during the week and, taken together, the […]

The more I think about Tip O’Neill’s old adage “All politics is local,” the less it makes sense. When I first heard it in the ’80s, it sounded spot on. […]

I’m not worried about the government shutdown or the debt ceiling crisis. Neither, apparently, is Wall Street. I feel totally disconnected from the theater of the absurd on Capitol Hill. […]

How much would you pay to save someone you love? Everything? How much, then, to save something you love from being lost forever? Depends on the value of the thing […]

I remember reading a think piece somewhere (probably in The Stone blog) that talked about the correlation between musical training and academic achievement in school aged children. In the comments […]

I am ashamed of my country’s memory. I get it. We were born into collective amnesia—so focused on making the future bright and so afraid of falling back if we […]

I write these little essays every Monday morning. There are some mornings when I don’t feel like writing them. I stare at the blinking cursor and realize there’s nothing to […]