Over the last several months, I’ve been on a good run.
It started with being asked to give the commencement address at my alma mater.
Then on Friday, I published my first piece for Esquire. I’ve always wanted to write for them and this specific topic, “Dads without Dads” is an especially personal reflection timed for Father’s Day.
There is an NPR special report I’m working on examining inequality in education on Long Island that will air at the end of the month.…
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” This lyric from the final song in Hamilton, captures not only an important question about our history but also about our present.
There are different versions of our histories – within our families, our institutions, our country and our world.
In many ways, it is less important to reconcile our complicated personal and national histories than it is to at least spend some time examining them.…
These are hard.
What would you take for yourself, that you know would help someone else more?
What would you give your child, that if you gave to another child instead would dramatically change their life?
These philosophical questions are ones that we don’t explicitly ask ourselves. They are by design difficult to answer. They pit our egalitarian principles and a belief in a fair world against our most basic desire to provide and protect ourselves and those we love. …
In conjunction with Women’s History Month, my 11 year old daughter came home from school with an assignment to write a paper about a female member of her family that was no longer with us.
She chose her great grandmother, whom she never had the chance to meet but shares a middle name.
As part of this assignment she had to interview at least two members of our family who knew Nana using a series of questions supplied by her teacher.…
If you rode the school bus when you were a child, do you remember who you sat next to? Can you see the faces of the other kids on that bus? Do you know or maybe wonder where any of them are today?
In his book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof talks about his number 6 bus in Yamhill, Oregon.…
If you rode the school bus when you were a child, do you remember who you sat next to? Can you see the faces of the other kids on that bus? Do you know or maybe wonder where any of them are today?
In his book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof talks about his number 6 bus in Yamhill, Oregon.…
I struggled with figuring out what to write this week. Conflicting instincts pulled me to either express rage at the events at the Capitol last week and look back at all that led up to it or to move past them and share some thoughts of hope or even beauty.
Stuck in the middle, I remembered this quote from the movie Wall Street. “Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him.…
On any given day, approximately 800,000 people in the United States will celebrate their birthday. When we are young, we sit with a birthday cake before us, surrounded by friends and families and we make a wish to blow out the lit candles marking our years.
In any given year, many of these wishes bear some semblance to one another despite the diversity of the wish makers. …
While walking my dog in the woods nearby, I stopped to marvel at a giant fallen oak. Uprooted from the ground, it was hard to surmise what had toppled this mammoth tree. I was full of wonder at the extensive roots laid bare for all to examine the many connections severed. Feelings of both loss and hope filled me as I was reminded that soon that tree would decompose with its nutrients revitalizing the soil that it would soon become part of.…
When I was a young boy, I loved to listen. I would saddle up next to my Mom, eavesdropping on grown up talk, while cigarette smoke filled the air. I would hole away in my room, laying on the top bunk, listening closely to the lyrics of every song on a new album. Late at night, I’d strain to hear the static filled voices of talk radio hosts, broadcasting from AM stations hundreds of miles away, until I eventually drifted off to sleep. …
