“Otto’s name for the corner of the basement where my desk is located was the German ‘Kabuff,’ but that word implies a dark, dusty studio, and my stateside kabuff is ‘a clean, well-lighted…

“As a founding member of the AAAAAA, the American Association Against Acronym Abuse Anonymous, I ask your forgiveness for the epigraph above. I could not resist. The AAAAAA, which operates out of my…

“While I do appreciate the sun-ripened fruits that line my breakfast bowl, my worshipful awe stems more from Sol’s drop-mike nonchalance. As Galileo said, while Sol keeps his eight planets in line over…

“Despondent as I am at the prospect of Trump’s second term, I take hope in the long view offered by Georg Hegel’s dialectic. Since 3200 BC, the start of recorded history, every new…

“Despite my respect for the truth, if a badly dressed lunatic crawls in an open window, waves a knife under my nose, and demands to know where my wife is, I’ll tell him…

“After the Atlanta Braves removed Chief Noc-A-Homa’s teepee in 1982, and the team lost 19 of the next 20 games, our son, a devoted Braves fan, blamed the gods. The team’s creation of…

“That was the first time I laid eyes on my future bride, but something was already astir. As J. D. Salinger had written in ‘A Girl I Knew,’ ‘She wasn’t doing a thing…

“Pacifists are often jealous of the fact that Bhutan has more monks than soldiers, Monaco’s national orchestra is larger than its military, and Costa Rica must borrow a cannon from El Salvador when…

“An Austrian tour guide once observed that saying farewell to a group of American tourists she’d known for only two weeks is a lot like grief, for it’s unlikely she and this random…

“Shortly after my first book was published, I received a small royalty check and promptly squandered it on some books that were available at the local libraries. Said my frugal wife, ‘Skip, if…