I spent my working life in three different fields—four years each in special education and basketball coaching, then some 35 years in the communications field split between journalism and PR/advertising. My special ed knowledge is no doubt dated since I haven’t really kept up with the field, my basketball knowledge is a bit dated but still highly functional, and my communications work quite current since I remain a close follower of matters related to the absorption and conveyance of words and ideas.

One thing I’ve noticed repeatedly over that now long span is that whenever someone with no direct experience in those fields begins speaking with an air of authority and strong opinions on them (“The media ALWAYS…”….”Why doesn’t the coach…?”), my internal response, which I do not share with them unless we’re extremely good buddies, tends toward: “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”

How could they?

“So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close,” muses coal merchant Bill Furlong, the protagonist in Claire Keegan’s finely sculpted 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These.” Furlong had been admiring the river that passes through his small Irish town, but upon approaching it, finds himself wondering “which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.”

(Side note right off the top: “…he rathered…” Please don’t ever listen to anyone who suggests language, “mere” words, aren’t beautiful and endlessly pliable things.)

The same basic questions—distanced or closeup? gauzy appearance or sharpened reality?—run like a low-voltage current through this slim tale of 110 pages that lingers long after works of triple the length take leave of one’s consciousness with the morning mist. At barely an hour’s read and available in full here, Keegan’s tale is a case study in th...

In these not-much-United States, we live, by any statistical measure one applies, in a new Gilded Age. Not since the age of the robber barons and the current president’s favorite predecessor, William McKinley, has the gap been so yawning between the upper and lower wealth strata of our society, not to mention the gap between the developed and undeveloped economies around the world.

The data are most everywhere one cares to look, a bare fraction of which we will touch on in this post. The common fact binding them together is that the rich keep getting richer at an accelerating pace.

According to the Federal Reserve, in the U.S. as of 2022, the bottom 50% of the population owned only 2.8% of the wealth. On the near-bottom rung in a country of 340 million that has long been the richest in the world, somewhere between 27 million-40 million people live below the official poverty line, which is $32,150 for a fam...

All right, so we will let pass without further comment the strange coincidence of the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.—and all the noble ideals he stood and died for—falling this year on the same day as the inauguration of the incoming president. We shall instead focus on another profoundly decent man who also called us to our better angels over a long career of music-making.

I, perhaps like you, have sung David Mallett’s music out loud on various occasions over many years now without even knowing who he was. His “Garden Song” (“Inch by inch, row by row….”) has been a staple of elementary school students and gardeners of all ages from all over the world since its 1975 debut. Soon after, it was brought to the attention of none other than folk icon and humanitarian Pete Seeger.

“Young fella from Maine taught me this song last year,” Seeger, quite the songwriter himself, tells his concert audience...