Archive

I’ve always enjoyed mentoring young people. As a college student, I tutored at-risk junior high kids; in graduate school, I served as an editor at the student newspaper, collaborating with teens as they developed their prose; as a professional journalist, I worked as an internship...
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My personal effects have gone missing of late. I’ll prepare for a gym visit and realize my exercise pants have disappeared. I’ll look for my baggy sweatshirt of preference (an ugly gray thing with orange lettering), and it’s nowhere to be found. Recently, my hair...
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I’m a product of disparate influences. I’m the child of a Jewish father and a Chinese mother — the latter a raging atheist — so my cultural and spiritual sensibilites are a pastiche as organized as a Jackson Pollock image. More than once, my backgrounds...
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By David Weinshilboum Fourteen years ago, my son’s life almost ended before it began. The whole birthing process started out harmlessly enough, very much like the scenarios you’d see on those Learning Channel shows. There was a lot more waiting around than tension: wait for...
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Dear NRA member, Let’s start with the obvious. We don’t see eye to eye on guns. Really, though, we aren’t that different. You want your family to be safe; I would do anything to protect my family, too. You want control of your decisions without...
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As a young boy, I constantly heard my parents condemn the state of the world. In their minds, my generation was responsible for many of society’s ills. Of course, my actions reflected the transgressions of my generation. If I walked to the bus stop in...
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Don’t call me Ishmael. This is not an epic story, and there are no tattooed cannibals or white whales in this yarn. The only connection this story has to Herman Melville’s great work is the importance of Starbuck, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Some...
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As a kid, I hated scary movies. I saw too many of them at an early age. My sister, five years my elder, had an appetite for horror that couldn’t be satiated. Stephen King novels inundated her bookshelves and films like “Halloween” and “Alien” were...
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My parents met in the 1960s and fell in love. My mother was a recent Chinese immigrant. She arrived in the United States to attend college. She found my (Caucasian) father at Kansas University. More specifically, she found him in a graduate-level anatomy class. She...
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