“One of them, though, took my breath away. On duty at the clothes shop, where men’s shoes are urgently needed, a tall young woman with a slight accent started up a conversation. Introducing…

  “Once again, I was without heroes, and I was becoming quite cynical about the entire idea of heroism. As I became increasingly involved in civil rights work and in the anti-war movement,…

“There are times when words are the last things on my mind. These times are rare (and rarefied), as immersed as I have been, since the age of three, in language. But, on…

“He has that sense of history that is common among those of us who are graduates of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. What is uncommon, and heroic, is how he has transmuted that…

“Perhaps, there’s a need to revisit another category of heroism: virtuous action and extraordinary bravery that arises out of something other than adherence to a personal code or ruined chivalric hierarchy, or to…

“I see no heroes in high places in our country. The heroes I see today are walking next to me on the street, riding the train I take, working long hours: the single…

Won Over By Reality By Tim Bayer Those injured and those helping after the Boston Marathon bombing. Note: This essay first appeared in Weekly Hubris in 2013. BRIGHTON New York—(Weekly Hubris)—March 2017—The first…

“I have been lucky to live with these storytellers who gave me so much material to write about. One regret is that they rarely wrote things down, themselves.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is…

“If you’re reading these words and comprehending their meaning, it’s too late for my premier bit of advice: do not use written language. It’s temptingly beautiful, like a flower with thorns or a…

“My ancestor was a product of two distinct worlds, the Christian and the Muslim, the Ottoman and the Byzantine, and such a symbiosis was far from uncommon, though Modern Greece’s national mythology demands…