Comédie des Toilettes I find my cross-cultural comparisons spend a lot of time on issues related to the bathroom. This isn’t out of an overtly crude sense of humor; it is merely that, from my experience, failure to quickly understand local cultural mores on waste disposal will inevitably result in disaster. Whether it is navigating […]
The Cacophony As much preparation as I put into being a dad, I continue to be surprised at the variety and volume of noises that are produced by my three spawn. One kid was easy. We rocked out together, most notably to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in which he would do a pitchy but generally […]
The Littlest Insurgent In between larger projects, I am always working on silly short stories. My fourth collection will be out sometime in 2026. This short story was inspired by a quip in my parenting memoir, Parenting as a Contact Sport in which I compared babies at naptime to the Taliban. As a linguist, I […]
Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter. I wanted to create a space where I can reach out directly to people who might be interested in what I have to say. I have relied primarily on Facebook for the last several years, but their algorithm buries anything that is more than a few hundred […]
*** 4 AM Wakeup. It’s 90 minutes to the trailhead and I’d like to start before daybreak, finding my way by the earliest signs of morning light. All three kids are asleep and the first thing to do is to move them inside the truck. The oldest wakes up, briefly. The other two are like […]
Not long ago, I was startled by a friend describing her afternoon of knocking down wasp nests. I would describe this person as left-of-center, concerned about climate change, and other issues regarding our inability to live within the earth’s carrying capacity. It didn’t compute that knocking down wasp nests would be part of the day’s […]
This is one of my favorite essays. It was written by Pat Conroy in 1973. I post it here for the purpose of social commentary in an upcoming book about a year-long trip around the country. Such publication is covered under Fair Use Doctrine and is not a copyright violation. The Horse is a sacred […]
This House Is Not Our Google Home I say that I married into a year-long trip around the country in a travel trailer. It was a second marriage for both of us. For each of us, our first marriages were with someone philosophically incompatible. When searching for a second spouse, each of us had checklists […]
Let’s be clear form the beginning. Martin Theroux was in no way responsible in the disappearance of Maryam Fadel. While his exoneration has been well documented in the news, it doesn’t change the fact that for six months he was harassed without end. The death threats rising to the point that he was pulled from […]
TLDR: The US passed some interesting legislation in the early 90s that would give victims of torture the ability to sue their torturers in US Courts. It is with some irony that the very first successful lawsuit under this law involved a US Citizen turned Roman Catholic nun suing a Guatemalan Defense Minister with ties […]