“If I had been a Jew living under Hitler, I hope I would have mustered the courage to enter a plot to kill the blighter. Holed up in an attic overlooking a street…

“As the temperatures climbed back into the 90s following the recent eclipse, I was struck by the fact that the entire enterprise is riding on loose rock. I walked off testing the ground…

“Clark Gable is remembered as a thrice-divorced and five-time married screen actor, but he understood what ‘home’ meant: a place you approach knowing someone inside is listening for your footsteps. Whether it’s an…

“The blithe independence of snakes did not sit well with Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1834, he criticized four snakes he’d seen ‘gliding’ up and down a Massachusetts valley, ‘not to eat, not for…

“The pretense of chastity is available with a $30 purchase of a silicon hymen, which releases a red dye when subjected to pressure. What’s interesting is that some females are born without hymens,…

“Though only about 15 pecent of American doctors are sued for malpractice, more than 250,000 patients die annually from their doctors’ errors, a statistic that ranks as the country’s third leading cause of…

“In March of 2017 as I write, many Americans like myself are bewildered by a ‘jester’ who has seized the ‘throne,’ and it remains to be seen how the leveling will fare under…

“The American psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp has cautioned, ‘If you have a hero, look again; you have diminished yourself in some way.’ I would not go quite that far because I know my reverence…

“Though I carried a can of dance wax to the high-school prom, I was ‘timber toes,’ ‘terminally Caucasian,’ and ‘a dog with four left feet.’ After the first slow dance, my date asked…

“Exactly what is this abstraction that haunts us? The literature is vast and complex. Augustine thought a man’s erection was a revolt against God. Eighteenth-century Shakers decided intercourse had been Eve’s original sin.…