For students and teachers, Labor Day used to be the marker for the start of a new school year, but almost everyone has jumped the gun by now, in some parts of the South by almost a month now. So, let’s stay with the holiday’s original meaning – celebrating workers and their rights to organize for fair wages, humane work hours and protected holidays. I’m going to invoke the latter to declare a...

I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating in the light of recent developments. The late writer Julius Lester commented that when political candidates are interviewed, they are often asked, “What books are you reading?” The answer to this anticipated question is usually some uplifting piece of non-fiction – a book by Churchill or a biography of Lincoln, perhaps. Lester argued that the...

                        “Someone told me years ago that I should always have a place in my  mind where I could imagine myself happy, so that when I wasn’t happy I could go there.”...

Headlines like The Death of the Novel, The Death of Reading or Why Johnny Can’t Read are effective in selling magazines. They usually reflect some concerning shifts in the cultural or educational landscape, but at the cost of shrinking the complexity of the problem they are attempting to alert us to.That’s the mindset I brought to the recent featured story in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch...

The route to our plot in the community garden takes me past the site of the Obama Center 3 or 4 times a week. As a result, I’ve witnessed the construction of the main building and the reshaping of the surrounding environment during the past 3 or 4 years. I’ve hated the emerging shape of the centerpiece from the beginning. It’s bulbous and aesthetically unpleasing; the finished product hasn’t...