When COVID-19 struck and the world shut down in March 2020, I escaped reality by searching for the dream toy of my childhood.
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Searching for the U.S.S. Flagg
What was my pandemic nostalgia really about?
Essays
Singin’ in the Rain
It’s not COVID; my throat is sore from singing all day
I come from the country that invented karaoke. I still remember going to my first karaoke when I was in first grade, with my two friends from school and all of our moms. We went to eat ramen afterwards. It was a perfect day.
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No Regrets
When is it time to let go of a book?
I have donated my collection of books on writing to my local library. Why?
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My NBA Love Affairs
On finding the right team to root for
The Golden State Warriors’ broadcast on a local station was an excuse for Stanford students to congregate in common rooms and eating clubs, a break from studying and a topic of conversation. Plus, the Warriors of 1986-87 were a lovable, ragtag, perennially second-tier squad whose best player, Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, was famous for having the league’s most apt nickname.
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Trumpeter Swan
A life bird
According to the notes in my old National Geographic bird guide, on November 8, 1980, I saw a trumpeter swan at the Crabtree Nature Center in Barrington Hills, Illinois. A life bird. My mother had been in the hospital in downtown Chicago for nearly two months.
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The Crafts of Freedom
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Mountaintop speech was more than brilliant rhetorical art; it was also the culmination of a lifetime spent in intense and extensive reading
April 2, 2015 We rightly associate Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratorical eloquence with his vocation as a Baptist minister, following his father and grandfather before him. But King also emerged from the rhetorical tradition of the liberal arts, transforming the sources with which he engaged throughout his too-brief life.
