A Year of Essays: January 16, 2022 I was a fan of Jeopardy! back when Art Fleming hosted. I dreamed of being on the game show, and once made it to the in-studio auditions in the late ’80s. Two of the five in my group made it on the show…

A Year of Essays: January 15, 2022 Today should have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 93rd birthday. Almost 54 years since his assassination, his legacy looms even more largely now during these racially roiled times. I remember, vividly, the night of April 4, 1968. “CBS News interrupts its program for…

A Year of Essays: January 14, 2022 (from the Archives) I met someone over 37 years ago. His given name is Eric, though I called him Boogerbutt. Instant attraction. My newly-born nephew would teach me about life over and over. When Eric was four, we went for a picnic in…

A Year of Essays: January 13, 2022 Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, was quoted in a Washington Post article on the 6.6% decline in enrollments at colleges and universities since the start of the pandemic. …

A Year of Essays: January 12, 2022 It was late 2019 when I first learned about Ida B. Wells. Yesterday, Mattel announced it would honor her with a Barbie doll, part of Barbie’s Inspiring Women’s series. Good for Mattel. In late 2019, in planning for Women’s History Month 2020, I…

A Year of Essays: January 11, 2022 Brian Broome’s opinion piece in yesterday’s Washington Post caught my attention just with the title: “I like being right. I don’t like how I handle it.” He recounts his elementary school days when having the right answer was met with scowls and smugness…

A Year of Essays: January 10, 2022 Today’s breaking news story is a 57-year old man who has received a heart from a genetically modified pig. I’m old enough to remember the first successful heart transplant in 1967 and the first artificial heart transplant in 1982. In each case, doctors…

A Year of Essays: January 9, 2022 Yesterday, I found this piece I wrote, presumably some exercise from the 2017 Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive since it was in the stack from that weekend. I don’t remember the circumstances of why I wrote it or where I wrote it. I know…

A Year of Essays: January 8, 2022 During my teaching career, I have mostly dissuaded my students from taking my word as gospel. Certain things are undisputable — the standards of written communication (though they are constantly changing), scientific evidence (though new evidence can change the paradigm), certain causes and…