Someone extremely close to me just had his identity stolen, his email hacked into, and his address list dunned for money. The message that went out to his whole list claimed he was stranded in London and so please wire $4,000 immediately. One good clue: The letter-writer clearly wasn’t entirely at home in English. Then […] Read More

I think it takes a fair amount of the ordinary daily kind of boldness to be or to host a house guest. Not everyone feels that way, I know. (My office partner, for one, is ever keeping visiting actors or musicians or exchange students for weeks and months at a time without even thinking to […] Read More

Saturday night I went to see a one-man play based on the nonfiction book Blood Done Sign My Name, the story of a racial conflict and killing of a young black man in Oxford, NC, back when author Tim Tyson was living there as a young son of a liberal minister. His book, a bestseller […] Read More

I’ve just come back from taking care of my mother for a couple of days after some minor surgery. I was struck once again by the courage required to face the various adventures of aging. Mom’s actually quite sturdy at 86; the stories she tells are what make me aware of the perilous nature of […] Read More

A politician once told me, in talking about a panel he’d been on where some too-amazing stories were told, that he “hadn’t had the opportunity to rescue any children from burning buildings lately.” Most of us haven’t. And yet, most of us do run into plenty of opportunities and needs for courage. I just ran […] Read More

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” —Charles Kingsley, nineteenth century English minister who wrote The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, as well as being chaplain to Queen Victoria. Quoted on The […] Read More

How many women who graduated in 1955 wind up a full-half century later as National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a founder of a company that is designing an undersea vehicle to allow “full working access to the world’s oceans?” Often referred to as “Her Deepness,” Sylvia Earle is highly likely the only one. And she is an […] Read More

My 22 year-old nephew Walker and his girlfriend Caitlin, both UNC students, came over for lunch today. She had never been to our house. From 9:30 until 1, Bob and I madly scurried, getting ready. Mostly that meant near-renovating our house. He took more than a wheelbarrowful of papers and books out of the kitchen […] Read More

Oh, dear, oh, dear, I lost a Follower. What that means is: there’s some cyberspace way people can sign up to be Followers of particular blogs. I guess that means subscribers. On my blog “dashboard,” I can see how many this blog has. Well, today I saw that this blog is DOWN ONE Follower. I […] Read More

A delightful discovery, recommended by friend Sabine: the TED site and its speaker series…and the talk on “A different way to think about creative genius” by Elizabeth Gilbert, the wildly successful author of, among others, Eat, Pray, Love, three verbs whose order I regularly forget. TED is a conference that aims to present “the world’s […] Read More