Going to an exciting, late-night New Year’s Eve party? Me neither. And this year, those of us who prefer a quiet, reflective evening at home don’t even have to feel so profoundly uncool. It’s what everyone—everyone with any sense—is doing this weekend. Still, I’m looking forward to sweeping out all the bad luck of 2020 … Read More
Michael and I invented Camp Remowas twenty years ago, when the kids went off to camp every summer. Money was tight in those days. (College was looming, weeks off work were few, and parents lived far away. We both worked two jobs, and relaxing vacations were few and far between.) One afternoon, I said plaintively, … Read More
What do contemporary Americans regard as a satisfactory resolution for a young man’s spiritual quest? What do we want our heroes to learn and to become? That’s the question I began to ask over the past few weeks, as I (like a lot of other Americans) watched the second season of The Mandalorian. I … Read More
By one of those lovely coincidences that sometimes happen, I was reading Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance (about various kinds of fathers and what we inherit from them) when I got the call last week that my father’s clock was repaired and ready for pickup. My father was a railroad man—the kind who didn’t just work for … Read More