Diary of a Really Really Boring Kid

Freedoms often collide, creating accidental martyrs in modern American — Readers please note: this fictional story includes a description of sexual assault. The kids were returning to school when we heard the news. The Philadelphia Inquirer called him Socrates of Rittenhouse Square. For us, that front-page story has been our everyday story. …

Never listen to rock and roll lyrics — I did everything to impress women except speaking to them. Between the ages of 3 and 24, I was a disaster with women. Why should such disasters still haunt me now at 51? There was one girl who lived around the corner. Let’s call her Juliet. I don’t know what…

The Appeal and the Tragedy of the South — What makes the South so fond of its past? To understand a Southerner’s fondness for monuments and say, the rebel flag, it is essential to understand its culture through its rich literary history. Leafing through such pages will not excuse racism or intolerance or xenophobia, but at least it may help us understand. Every September in AP Language and…

In scholarly fashion, I sailed through the Victorian Age with The Boz — Let’s Just Say I Read and Listened — Like ‘the Dickens’ My journey with CD, Charles Dickens, started not with reading Oliver Twist in 9th grade. I may have read A Tale of Two Cities in my senior year, but I may have had other pressing concerns in 1987 than Charles Darnay and the French Revolution. Work, car trips, parties, and…

A poem by William Butler Yeats — I use this amazing Irish poem when we study the American writer Henry David Thoreau and Walden. The parallels are striking: Thoreau in 1854 in America and William Butler Yeats from Ireland in 1888 while walking down Fleet Street in London. The poem came as a sudden “memory.” Innisfree is…

A poem by William Wordsworth — I do not teach British literature, but to understand the American Romantic period, we need to understand the influence of European writers like Wordsworth, Goethe, Shelley, and Keats on Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson. “The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth (1802) is a poem…

My musical tastes changed dramatically when I touched down in Heathrow in 1989 — I generally disfavor lists without 500–1,000 word expository narratives about crazy adventures. …

My Mercedes-Benz W125 mind reads at 432.59 kilometers per hour. I’m sorry. — Dearest Medium Reader and Dedicated Followers, I think I need to explain. And maybe even apologize. I’m sorry. Really. I’m not writing this for “hits.” Years ago, Rutgers University offered “speed reading classes.” When the brochure arrived, along with The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, I thought: well, I got so much bathroom reading…