Yesterday, Forbes published an article entitled, " America's Fastest-Dying Cities ." Naturally, the old Rust Belt dominates...

If there was an award for "Oxygen Thief of the Year," the list of nominees would be impossibly long. I'm not discouraged, howe...

My father-in-law is a 79-year-old can of gasoline, and his 16-year-old grandson, our older spawn, is a human spark. They do care about each...

My formal education began at the age of five. Seated on a three-slat wooden bench, I was handed a felt pennant and taught to wave it wheneve...

For 12 hours today, our village's main drag is closed. The strains of all-American music serenade us from two temporary stages. And from...

There's brief article worth reading in today's edition of the Knoxville News Sentinel . Asking the question, "It is safe to be ...

As I walked up toward the house from our mailbox last evening, I snapped that cell-phone shot of the sunset. All things considered, July...

As SoCal earthquakes go, yesterday's magnitude 5.4 temblor was something of a yawner. Swimming pools churned for a few seconds. Some sto...

At Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church last Sunday morning, 58-year-old Jim David Adkisson took a 12-gauge shotgun out of a guit...

"...I try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality." Bruce Springsteen is one of my favorite songwriters...

Every July, our village hosts a four-day summer festival, just like those held in small towns throughout America. Until a couple of years ag...

My wife, our older spawn and I decided to pay a visit to our village's annual festival last night, stopping on the way so I could withdr...

It's been more than fifteen years since the lids on our take-out cups began telling us that hot coffee is, well, hot . We have one Stell...

And you still can hear me singin' to the people who don't listen, To the things that I am sayin', prayin' someone's go...

If you've ever watched COPS -- and who hasn't? -- surely you've noticed that the vast majority of those "bad boys" (...

If you know me well, you know two things: I keep meticulous records and I pay my taxes . The recordkeeping thing is equal parts nurture and...

In his Legal Commonplace Book , Thomas Jefferson saw fit to include a passage from On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare, Marquis of Beccari...

In case you haven't seen the cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker , the one that's creating all the buzz, here it is. A caric...

The past week has been plenty eventful, but after last Monday's mad dash to the ER I haven't put together a train of thought that mi...

We made another trip to the emergency room last night. At dinner, our older spawn inadvertently consumed a bit of skim milk, hidden in the ...