Outside my study window, our garden is visited constantly by birds. Cardinals, redpolls, finches, doves, grackles, catbirds, downy woodpeckers, flickers, evening grosbeaks, bluebirds, owls, even two big gorgeous hawks. This week, they have become my muse, because they...
This week a sad thing happened: it was announced that some 12,500 employees are being laid off at Microsoft’s devices unit. What elevated this event from merely a shame to an outrage, and at the same time a sort of uneasily, weirdly hilarious outrage, was the way they...
Apparently I’ve been ambling in and out of Amazon’s “Top 100 Most Popular Self-Help Authors” list for the past nine months. I had not really thought of the stuff I write as “self-help,” exactly. Whenever the term comes up, it invariably calls to mind the wisdom of...
When my older son Nick was a toddler, he used to sit in the kitchen and smash trucks. It went like this: We had a long, picnic-table-style oak dining table that we kept along a wall across from the refrigerator. Nick would sit at one end, slung snugly into his hook-on...
It still surprises me sometimes. Awakening in the morning, stretching out my toes under the sheets as the vestiges of dreams resolve themselves into the sounds and smells of my life here and now, then gradually opening my eyes, turning silently until they rest on my...
