I figured I’d give the speech, measure the applause in my head, sit down, look around the theater to see who’d liked it, examine the kids’ faces to see if they’d liked it, look at all the ornate detail of the astoundingly restored Warner Theater to pass the time, replay the speech in my head, [...]

I knew I’d really quit smoking when I stopped counting the days at 100, by which time everyone’s eyes were starting to glaze over as I kept blathering about my triumphal coup, the way my own eyes always start looking for a way out when people start telling me about their babies. Besides: it was [...]

You have to love it: a brash, loose-cannon, Us-Against-Everybody-Else franchise struts and barks its way through the playoffs, following the lead of a verbose, defiant rotund head coach with an X-rated vocabulary — and a distinctly aberrant behavioral quirk. They topple the favored establishment teams, and gloat over the corpses. They’re people, not drones.
True, [...]

“According to a lawyer in baseball briefed on the negotiations, the Yankees have made Jeter a three-year, $45 million offer… The lawyer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to sensitive information.”– New York Times
NEW YORK – As the discussions between New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter [...]

The downsides of suddenly not smoking after eight years of enslavement: Trying to ignore my lungs chanting “Feed me!!!” all day, like the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Trying to open the insidious little Nicorette packages until I finally give up and resort to garden shears. Shouting at my middle-school musical cast at [...]

I’m honored to be here, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’m lucky enough to be in the presence of students whose talents are destined to make a difference in a world that needs you. Secondly, I’m glad to be able to talk to you when you’re all at finishing up one stage [...]

Were you a Raiders fan when you were younger?
Insanely so. At Yale in the Seventies, when my boring, gray-flannel Giants were foundering, I was an angry, anarchic, substance-loving rebel without a cause…except pro football. There was only one way to reconcile those two disparate personalities: falling in love with a football team that wore its [...]

I was sitting on my front porch in Millerton when I heard the sounds of a concert band whose brassy notes drifted over my neighbors’ trees and lured me, like a siren-song, down to the center of town. As I walked down the hill, the music grew louder. It was an astounding piece of music: [...]

The face was weathered, etched by a lifetime of carrying a very heavy weight. The gait was slightly awkward; he’d lost his left leg below the knee in 2003, a casualty of diabetes. But on this night last winter, as fans clustered around him at Fred Biletnikoff’s anti-drug foundation dinner in a hotel ballroom south [...]

Cracked king crab legs on ice with assorted sauces? Strip loin with cilantro pesto and spring green beans? Or maybe a customized omelette, with only the freshest of farmers-market ingredients? I was paralyzed by indecision. So I finally opted for a plate of sushi, featuring a crab roll that rivaled any I had ever [...]