“At the trials, the usual Nazi defense was, ‘I was following orders,’ or, ‘The gods I worshipped demanded death.’ Nevertheless, the court ruled that a soldier under orders who participates in what any…

“Nearly one-fourth of all US crop workers are employed in horticulture, according to the National Agriculture Workers Survey. The industry has depended heavily on immigrant labor for decades. When the latest survey was…

“For me, poetry is the psychological equivalent of a chiropractic adjustment. By moving words around and trying to get them in the right places, I bring myself back into a sort of equilibrium.…

“It all began on a tennis court in the late 80s. I was co-editing a magazine for a Greek hotel chain and, since we were writing most of the articles ourselves under pseudonyms,…

“Repeatedly poring through Prospero’s introduced me to a far greater range of flavors and ingredients than I’d thought possible. To this day, whenever I come across the book’s recipe for Venetian Pastitsio, I…

“As you will have sensed, the sought-after place where he belongs will be not so much a literal place as a state of emotional and mental well-being: wholeness felt and known, which he…

“Bill Bryson was joking, mostly, about Ohio. But buried in that joke is something true about the American road trip. It has always been equal parts myth and monotony, freedom and flat stretches…

“There are not many Christian authors who quote Homer with such frequency or such ease. Fewer still assume so confidently that their readers will recognize Homeric verses without explanation, understand their allusions instinctively,…

“Much soul-searching is taking place in these historically difficult times, some of it private, but some through the enormous and complicated sieve of the collective unconscious. We feel one another’s pain, enough so…

I want to build a house just like the man/across the bay who whistles as he pulls/bricks from the back of his donkey, a house/of words or shards of words from Homer’s time./In…