Finland has just been awarded “Happiest Country in the World” for its sixth straight year and while I’m sure they are all marvelously joyful people, I for one would like to call for a full audit. I guess anything is possible but that one country might dominate this title for…

In Defense of Sentimentalism I recently saw a movie called “A Man Called Otto”. It was a shamelessly sentimental film with a predictable storyline, and it reduced me to blubbering like a baby. Years ago as an undergrad studying literature it was exactly this type of sentimental story-telling that was…

How Frozen Pipes Helped Build My Character While Destroying My Basement In Vermont it’s advisable to hold your tongue about cold winters until you’ve weathered at least a few good pipe freezings. I’m not talking about a little plumbing trouble with some condo property in Killington. I’m talking pipes exploding…

Each Christmas season I experience strange and uncomfortable irony as an English teacher. Come December my wife morphs into a schoolmaster, I am demoted to student, and she serves me the most dreaded of all writing assignments: the End-of-Year, Family Christmas Letter. The deadline is completely inflexible. Her editing is…

If there is a month with a bit of baggage here in Vermont it has to be November. November — how do I say it nicely — isn’t getting punctuated with any kind of exclamation marks. Nobody’s scheduling any weddings in November. …

Let me start by saying that the full-sized, Zero-Gravity lawn chair you just ordered on Amazon isn’t going to arrive on your porch without some wifely explaining to do. …

Elections are on the horizon and again and voters will be asked once more to make sense of a dizzying constellation of issues and ideas in our contentious age. After careful consideration, however, I’m convinced that there stands one true North Star for 2022, a guiding light to help Americans…

We seem to live in a time of ungraspable statistics. The recent million mark of Covid deaths in America is certainly an example. The troubling war and refugee statistics coming out of Ukraine would also qualify. Let me add another number that might be far more of a gut statistic…

If dictators and autocrats trigger emotionally-complicated responses from the world, it probably has something to do with being simultaneously loathsome and laughable. Trying to find the right response to these dangerous crackpots is enough to give anyone emotional whiplash. Some kind of whiplash was certainly happening, for example, when the…