In just a couple of weeks, 50 boys with learning disabilities will take to a stage in Vermont, one after the other, to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory. It’s a daring experiment undertaken each February at the Greenwood School and its population of boys who’ve struggled in public schools. Diagnosed with ADD, dyslexia, and
READ MOREGo to any family-friendly place and you’ll see them. They are men in their late 20s to early 40s, pushing strollers, wearing backpacks full of baby supplies, and sometimes sporting baby carriers with infants tucked inside. Many of them have beards, wear baseball caps, and proudly flaunt their dad bods. They call their kids “buddy”
READ MOREPerhaps the penny has dropped. All 50 of them. In just a handful of hours, Great Britain leaves the European Union. Plagues of locusts, pestilence, and lepers wait patiently in the wings. From where I’m sitting, though, all looks rosy. No marauding gangs of mottled malcontents seething in the streets. A distinct lack of killer
READ MOREI live in Brazil. What image does that conjure up in your mind? Perhaps you think of pristine white beaches and coconut trees. Maybe your first thought is of the amazing soccer talent in this country. Maybe you are imagining a country populated by ridiculously good looking, surgically enhanced people. There’s a kernel of truth
READ MOREAt the age of 40, I converted to Catholicism. A friend of mine at the time, also Catholic, told me her rule when entering the confessional booth: “Be brief, be blunt, and be gone.” I’ll be following that advice about brevity and bluntness in this column. Most readers know of the sexual scandals of some
READ MOREWhile pressing her agenda to expand means-tested welfare programs, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is claiming that the federal government’s poverty statistics vastly undercount the number of Americans who are “destitute.” In reality, the exact opposite is true because those statistics omit a broad range of government benefits, charity, and unreported income. When these are counted, the poorest fifth of U.S. households consume five
READ MOREWomen across the West are under attack. Our enemy is not the infamous “patriarchy,” allegedly scheming to undermine us at every turn. Nor is it pregnancy, with its physical discomforts and emotional tribulations. Even children are blameless here, no matter how much their arrival can shift careers or thwart travel plans. No, the culprit is
READ MOREE.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of The Elements of Style, once wrote a story that aptly demonstrates the folly of central planning. White, a Maine farmer who wrote for The New Yorker and Harper’s, saw the story turned into an animated short, which he narrated 36 years after its publication. In “The Family that Dwelt Apart” – published in The New
READ MOREDomestic violence by women toward family members has risen twice as fast as those by men in the United Kingdom. According to statistics obtained by the Sunday Telegraph under freedom of information legislation, female perpetrators now account for 28 percent of cases of domestic violence – compared to 19 percent a decade ago. In a disturbing column in The Telegraph Celia
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