Essays

My great-grandmother, Granny-Great, had a poem she loved to recite. It wasn’t a lecture; it was only four lines. There was an owl lived in an oak. The more he heard, the less he spoke. The less he spoke,

Ostensibly, Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. He had a good publicist. Being friends with a writer is a dicey proposition. Sooner or later, you’

A priest I know once confessed that he has what he calls “a copy editor’s heart.” He wants to correct everyone’s mistakes. I laughed when he said it because I immediately recognized the impulse. Not in him. But in me.

So it turns out that I'm not the only one who learns things the hard way. Who knew? When I was attending college in Pittsburgh, an ex-boyfriend announced that he was flying to New Orleans to visit me over

We humans are pretty proud of our intelligence. We’ve built skyscrapers, landed on the moon, mapped the human genome, and carry more computing power in our pockets than NASA had during Apollo. And yet, sometimes we’re not so different from

I've been thinking about a number lately. 42. If you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you know it. A supercomputer called Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years calculating the Answer to the Ultimate