
The underground man
Seeking refuge from the bullying perils of adolescence, I often retreated to my outpost on high, the top of a [...]

Thoughts on gender
I read little in my teens. Here and there a book about baseball while dabbling in my father's set-aside novels, [...]

Uncle Joe’s heavy burden
Joe Biden may or may not ably and effectively manage the ever more bumptious United States, but what matters for [...]

Liberally lucky
It began with relentlessly recycled footage of a hijacked commercial jet slamming into a New York City skyscraper, followed by [...]

The I in me
Near-blindness makes the masked people look like mutants. The store innards seem to me like a place occupied by a [...]

Listening for music
Some stories acquire their relevance and moral aptness only through repeated retelling, each recitation adding a density and lushness to [...]

You can’t go home again
As a boy, my Sicilian ophthalmologist was for a long time addicted to American dog shows. He avidly watched "Rin [...]

Over the edge
To believe the world was flat conferred wonderful advantages to any boy who would not budge from this belief. At [...]

And the sun also rises
In June I made an appointment with my barber Franco whose shop is about a 15-minute walk from my home. [...]

Choose! An American polemic
America's not so beautiful these days. Blame it on a president or a virus, on racism or a public so [...]

Buzzing 2, Masked Men 0
Two exterminators have come to my balcony empire, attempting to lay siege to and destroy the wasp's nest nestled in [...]