When you buy a farm, said the Roman agricultural writer Palladius, you need to look at the people who live in the area. If they seem a sturdy lot, you can invest with confidence, but if they are podgy and pasty faced (that is a free translation of the Latin), then keep away. The local … Read more
A few weeks ago, when the Powerball was around $300 million, one of the chefs at my day job took up a collection among the employees at five bucks a head to buy as many tickets as he could. “Remember the Lunch Ladies!” he said. And so almost everybody pitched in for her share, and … Read more
Ratting out someone, even a creep who really deserves the exposure, is not usually done before an adoring throng, but furtively, behind closed doors—because people generally despise snitches. When Vanity Fair magazine revealed former FBI agent Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” last fall, old passions flared anew. Virtually everyone, even those who defended Richard Nixon … Read more
What, a student asked the other day, was the last place to be ruled by the Romans? Nowhere in Italy, that’s for certain; the last Roman emperor I know to have set foot on mainland Italy with the purpose of exercising political power was Constans II in 662. The Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne … Read more
I was hanging out with a group of buddies the other day and several conversations were going on all at once. During a lull in the chatter, I heard my friend Mike describe someone he had known all of his life as a guy who was once a world-class adventurer, but who wound up “a … Read more
Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast. For many years, the desire to avoid students … Read more
When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he … Read more
I just saw Memoirs of a Geisha. In the movie, there’s a scene where the geishas play a drinking game with their clients. Somebody tells two stories, and then everybody else has to guess which is true. With that idea in mind, I have two stories for you this month. Story #1 goes like this. … Read more
Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial … Read more
These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the … Read more