My friend Kimberly’s passion for kids and teaching always stokes the embers that remain from my years in the classroom. When she visited recently, I asked her how the year ahead looked after the initial week with her second graders. It happened that we had been engaged in a conversation about the challenges of getting kids with special needs the services they deserved, so it wasn’t surprising...

“If it don’t kill you, it’ll make you fatter.” I first heard this phrase from a colleague who attributed it to her Puerto Rican grandmother. I’ve since encountered many variations of it, as I’m sure you have as well, but the meaning doesn’t vary. We all face adversity at some point in our lives. Sometimes the experience causes permanent psychic damage, but if we struggle to overcome it, we emerge...

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. This is not the beginning of a funeral oration. In this case, the “Lord” I have in mind is also all-powerful, but her name is technology. I’ve been beside myself for the last couple of days because my computer monitor died, and my attempts to replace it kept failing.I’ll tell the story of that failure in a minute, but first I need to explain why the tech...

One of the few reasons I look forward to reading Sunday’s Chicago Tribune is John Warner’s Biblioracle column. He’s one of my favorite reviewers. He’s an enthusiast, not a “critic. He helps point me to books that may have escaped my attention, in particular novels, which leads me to the real subject of this piece. In addition to commenting on particular books, Warner keeps an eye on trends in the...

Picture a team of sled dogs, dragging behind them a palette of all the means of publication representing our past homes – New York, Mississippi, Houston, Chicago. We still subscribe to print publications and/or subscriptions to web sites from each of these places. One that I especially value is Distant Dome by Gary Rayno, who reports on a variety of New Hampshire news. He’s particularly sharp on...