“Rarely do the commentators and the golf writers remember to mention the source of that horticultural magnificence for which the Augusta National is rightly celebrated. When founders of the golf club, Bobby Jones…

“‘Is Tom there?’ I can still hear my father mimicking the girls who used to call my teenage brother several times a day back in the mid-1940s. He would lift his own voice…

“Ravitch had gained access to a vast glossary compiled from ‘bias guidelines issued by major educational publishers and state agencies’ for any writer preparing texts or tests for K-12 students. Presumably, with this…

“I was, let’s say, witness to a number of amazing experiences during these months of recovery, of realignment, of rebirth. There were escapades of utterly insane, reckless high speed chases through farmers’ fields;…

“Any one of these days can be the new first day, Day One, where things seem to be going well. No problem. Any missed understanding can be beginner’s luck, it can be even…

“I, being a devout sensualist, looking for thrills wherever I may unearth one, have become adept at switching perspectives, a mental skill I practice in order to tolerate the occasionally intolerable. It occurred…

“He was old when last I saw him. He’d quit fighting the mirror. His hair was clipped short, unlike the Cinnabon concoction of the 70s. No more that hopeful objet trouvé swirling over…

“Cut flowers are often left at gravesites and at locations where sudden death has taken place. Their cutting and consequent wilting provides a symbolic parallel to the ephemerality of human existence and of…

“We want it all, and we want it for a very long time, and preferably forever, a concept that our deep-seated faith in technology, our fear of death, and our uniquely American vanity…

“A salient fact about dictators or aspiring despots is that they consistently place the blame for all the ills of the world on “the other.” They seduce followers by affirming that any tribulations…