On the 24th day of my pandemic isolation, I learned my Pishi, my auntie, had died in her home in Kolkata. The news was not wholly unexpected – she…
I haven't written in a while. I've been busy. In the months since my last post, I quit my job at CNN, moved to Gainesville, Florida, and began teaching writing…
I heard Andrew Young say this morning that it's a waste of time to protest Confederate monuments. That energy, he said on NPR's Morning Edition, should be reserved to continue…
I thought I was in Amsterdam until I sat down to dine at Kantjil & de Tijger on Spruistracht. On the menu was an Indonesian feast: Pangsit Goreng, Ajam Sereh…
I am turning 50 this week. Whoa. Seriously? The big 50? Seems like yesterday that I was bragging about not being 40 yet. Not that I am freaking out. My…
It seems that in every football pool, I pick near the bottom of the first round. Funny how that works, eh? The big guns were all beyond my grasp…
The earliest versions of chess originated in ancient India but it wasn't until Viswanathan Anand did my homeland claim its first grandmaster. The 42-year-old just won another world championship this week…
Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins in the 1960s "Dark Shadows."In the late 1960s, we lived for a while in a rented house on Adams Circle in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every…
The place where you spend your formative years can draw you back with the pull of a magnet to metal. Or it can repel, the desire to divorce yourself from…
