And now for something completely different. When I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois, I used to get on students for using, or I should say, misusing words—especially slang or words that have no business being in anybody’s vocabulary—especially university students. I created a list of those words …
Sometimes a picture or a meme can express our feelings better than words. Sometimes it takes both images and words. Here then, are a few images and words that I will wager express what a lot of us are feeling these days of $7 per gallon gas (at least here …
Because a portion of my blog is dedicated to writing, from time to time, I like to post about the English language. So join me for a few English grammar lessons. Not to worry. We aren’t going to diagram sentences here. Do you remember doing that in elementary and middle …
Let’s think a bit about laws and how they impact our lives. First, there are laws made by human beings. Those laws are often ignored and broken. Then there are laws of predictable constants, laws of physics, and laws of nature. These are essentially immutable. But there are also laws …
The following column appeared in my local newspaper a while back. It is well-written and thought-provoking—two areas that I like to focus on in my blog, so I am sharing it with you today. The author is Joel Kotkin, executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. You can …
The other day a front-page story in the New York Times grabbed my attention like few others. The headline read: “At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?.” The answer, readers learned, was not the students but the award-winning professor who taught the class. To quote the …
On Wednesday, I reprinted a letter from Andrew Gutman, a New York City parent who, in 2021, pulled his daughter out of the exclusive private all-girls Brearley School in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan to protest the school’s woke policies regarding race and gender. In that letter, Gutman …
(Because this is “Banned Books Week,” I thought I might re-post a commentary I did a while back about how many American schools have decided to ban Harper Lee’s prize-winning book, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It is not only a wrong-headed policy; it is a dangerous act of censorship that …
Like a lot of people, I wasn’t aware that there is a week devoted to banned books. There is. It’s this week, and it began Sunday and runs to September 24. Below I have compiled a list of the most commonly banned books according to the American Library Association. These …
I recently received this insightful little story via email, and it made so much sense that I decided to share it with my followers and readers. It’s a great example of how big government works—or doesn’t, depending on your perspective. Take a look. You won’t be sorry—or perhaps you will, …