The Branding of the American Gun Issue

There are legitimate doubts about whether the watered down gun related legislation recently proposed would have had a significant effect on gun violence. But surely its abject failure has at least one cause that is not much mentioned. When I hear National Public...

Robert Frost in Russia

This past June, Franklin D’Olier Reeve, the husband of my favorite college professor, Laura Stevenson, died. I learned this, weirdly, from a Facebook friend who lives in Russia. He posted a link to Franklin’s obituary in the New York Times, which I suggest...

August Wilson's 20th Century

“Hold up. You’re not done yet,” the woman in the corner told August. “Who are you?” August asked, blinking. “My name is Vera, and I belong in that story you’re telling,” she said. “That play is about me. You got it...

Lighting a Spark with Fahrenheit 451

With the 2012 passing of American novelist Ray Bradbury and the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 2013, the time was right to return to his most famous work and use it as a starting point to discuss society, technology,...