250 years ago this week, the First Continental Congress concluded, with little decided and much hanging in the balance. Delegates from all the colonies except Georgia, including such notables as John Adams, Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Roger Sherman, and led by President Peyton Randolph of Virginia and…

This past week I attended a writer’s event and was supported by my mother, my sister, three aunts, and three female cousins. Meanwhile, we are going through a surreal political season in which one candidate is a serial womanizer and convicted sexual abuser who has taken away a woman’s right…

I learned a new word today. But first, about my big brother Harper, for those of you who don’t already know. For the past couple of decades, he has been the leader of a very cool thing on the campus of the University of Oregon called the Urban Farm. As…

If the day’s news has got you down, what you need is a jolt of hot sauce. But first, some history. In the 1860’s, Edmund McIlhenny was a wealthy banker living in a mansion in New Orleans. But then came the civil war, and the Union Army marched into town.…

OK, summer is underway. You’ve probably got your vacation dates set in the calendar, the flights are booked, the house rental is all paid for. Now you just need to get some mindless entertainment like a paperback thriller, a jigsaw puzzle, some crossword puzzle books, or a deck of cards……

For Memorial Day, here’s something that, sadly, you’ve heard before. And you have Daniel Butterfield to blame. He was just a kid from Utica, New York, who attended Union College and then joined his father’s firm, the Overland Mail Company. By the time he was 30, he was a principal executive at…

Let us now praise the pandemic. It was poetic that on the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day back in April 2020, when the world was completely shut down, the Earth demonstrated its amazing powers of recovery. There were jellyfish swimming in the suddenly clear channels of Venice. Folks in some…

Colorful Spring Pop Quiz: What word denotes a flavor, a monastery, a mountain range, as well as a color The backstory begins in Paris in 1605, when a French alchemist named François Hannibal d’Estrées provides a recipe for an “elixir of long life” to some monks of the Carthusian order.…