When my neighbor, an environmental engineer, moved in six years ago, she meticulously planned her garden in excel sheets. She mapped the plots, which plants, how many of each, and even used a measuring tape to space them. She’d ask me about a certain plant I had growing, or what…

Foreword: I awoke to a treasure chest on my porch. My father didn’t call, didn’t knock; he just made a five-hour round trip drive to leave a box of treasure (with typed letters for provenance) on my porch. …

Forward: The object below may appear to be a secretary desk that was commissioned for my grandmother, by my grandfather, on their fifth anniversary in 1962. I inherited it, along with his Army medals, thirty-two pots and pans, two Turkish rugs, seven dolls (only one of which is creepy), and bolts…

This piece is a response to Charles A. Kupchan’s “Putin’s War in Ukraine Is a Watershed. Time for America to Get Real” in the New York Times, April 11. Dr. Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He…

Middle management layers have been decreasing for decades, but a few years ago, consultants gave COOs the idea we could really “flatten” the organization by going a step further in creating fewer roles as well as levels. We could reduce costs and delays, while making happier, more motivated employees! It’s…

Driving six miles down a gravel road near Fort Riley, Kansas, the perpetual dust of hog farms and the crushed stalks of corn and alfalfa scratched at our eyes. The gravel lane was too long and narrow to turn the bus around so it dropped us at the end of…

A Short Story, South Carolina, February 1868. — Opal liked the names of brown and Black people’s places, places that sounded like songs, places like Yemassee, where the Pedee and Kewaunee Indians once lived. The Indians had been chased away by the French and Spanish, who were long gone now, too. The names all sounded curt and English…

It was another great American exceptionalism that foreign terrorism had never struck such a soft target on US soil before, at least not in the way we thought of terrorism then. Trains and markets were bombed and wars were fought elsewhere, but not here. Two years before, I had been…

A little over a year ago, I read Jake Tapper’s book The Outpost. It is one that will stay with me for life, whether or not I can bring myself to read it again. It’s haunting. It’s heroic. It’s tragic. And it’s as epic as anything Tolkien ever wrote. It…