Author: Ann Bauer

Something terrible happened to my family this week. What it is isn’t important, and I’m not being self-effacing when I say that. Individual calamities mean little but to the people who suffer them. Tragedies occur every day: Little children are struck by cars and killed; young people are diagnosed with hideous diseases; old people die…

I learned again last week that any blog, book, or article with the word "sex" in the title will be read. Not that this was news to me. But it’s a lesson that was reinforced by our nifty Popular Today list, which proved that sex sells better than anything except basketball. Which, when you think…

I haven’t a clue how to fix most of our huge national scourges. Global warming, gang violence, reality TV. These issues are just too big and ghastly and amorphous. What’s one person to do? But hunger. Now there’s a solvable problem. People are hungry, you feed them. Even tiny efforts make a difference. And every…

Typically, it is heat that frightens me. Perhaps this is because I grew up in Minnesota, but sweltering temperatures seem more sinister — thick and canopy-like and unavoidable — whereas cold has always struck me as surmountable. Until now. It was just last week, on what I assumed then would be the coldest night of…

I’ve spent the day researching the life of Michael Dorris: reading him, reading about him. And the dark, frantic moral of his story seems to be simply that some lives are unlivable. This is not a comforting thought. He was an extraordinary writer. No matter what his myriad sins, this man had a way on…