Category: Columns

  • “Are you my daddy?”

    In Porgy and Bess, caddish Sportin’ Life lures Bess from virtuous Porgy by crooning “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, well, it ain’t necessarily so.” Sportin’ Life could just as easily have been talking about the assumption that most men make—that their children are really their children. Many times, well, it…

  • Oranges and Persians

    Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was…

  • Don’t Panic, It’s Organic

    Enough tension-building hysteria. Yes! The polar ice-caps are melting! Yes! Migration habits are disturbed! Yes! The ozone layer has more holes in it than I-94 after the spring thaw! (Rim shot, please.) Environmentally, politically, socially, morally—we’re screwed. As humans, I believe this state of events is our natural habitat. That doesn’t make it right; it…

  • Free The Jackson Five!

    Just like a three-year-old defiantly staring down a plate of overcooked Brussels sprouts, I told the world I was not going to write about race stuff this month. I even promised my 16-year-old son that no matter what, I was not going to be The Rake’s resident “spook by the door,” spewing endlessly about skin…

  • Sushi and Sauvignon

    It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for…

  • Alarming Conversations

    I have a clock radio from 1978. It has two volumes, “Way Up” or “Silent.” The alarm is stuck between KQRS and buzzer, and after the Exxon Valdez coffee/hairspray spill of 1989, the on/off button is gunked up and doesn’t work. So I either plug it in, or I don’t. But it still does the…