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  • An Open Letter to Our Kakistocrat Elected Officials

    An Open Letter to Our Kakistocrat Elected Officials0

    Dear Mayors and Governors, In his book The Best Words, Robert Hartwell Fiske, once editor and publisher of the online Vocabula Review, defined kakistocracy (kak-i-Stock-rah-see) as “government by the worst, most unscrupulous, or least qualified citizens.” As one of his examples of usage, he offered this excerpt written by James Russell Lowell in 1876: “What fills me

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  • An Old-School Education Model Reinvented for the 21st Century

    An Old-School Education Model Reinvented for the 21st Century0

    My grandfather attended a one-room schoolhouse as a child, although he sometimes was thrown out for smelling like the skunks he pulled from his trapping route on the way to school. He made some good money checking his traps on the path to and from school, paid by Sears, Roebuck and Co. for the pelts

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  • An Old Guy Takes Some Lessons From ‘An Old-Fashioned Girl’

    An Old Guy Takes Some Lessons From ‘An Old-Fashioned Girl’0

    Why does someone past the Psalmist’s “threescore years and ten” find himself entranced by a 150-year-old novel aimed at adolescents, namely, Louisa May Alcott’s “An Old-Fashioned Girl”? The credit or blame – take your pick – for this infatuation lands on a friend whose passion is for older fiction aimed at young readers, like the

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  • An Old Guy Looks at Coronavirus

    An Old Guy Looks at Coronavirus0

    Ignorant. That word might well serve as my middle name. I know little of science, though my college professors taught me physics and biology. Higher mathematics is beyond my ken, though I minored in math in college. I recognize the names and the general ideas of certain philosophers, but can’t readily reconstruct Plato’s ideas about

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  • An Ode to the Fathers in My Life

    An Ode to the Fathers in My Life1

    Father’s Day is a day that brings up a full spectrum of feeling for me. This is true for several reasons: One, my relationship with my own father was complicated. Two, I’ve had many father figures who filled in where my father left a void: two grandfathers, a father-in-law, a stepfather, and, of course, my

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  • An Ode to Simple Meals

    An Ode to Simple Meals43

    At my bridal shower several summers ago, I was presented with a book of hand-written recipes cobbled together from the women I knew, and even those I didn’t, as several of my great-grandmother’s recipes made an appearance in the book, thanks to my aunt. That recipe book has been one of the greatest of my

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