The Marquis de Sade

Over the last few years, I have read biographies of the following people: Jacob Riis, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Maynard Keynes, Isabella Bird, Leonardo Da Vinci, Nicola Tesla, Joseph Smith, Walt Whitman, Simon Bolivar, Walter Johnson, Louis...

More scenes from a hagwon

You might think I’d have exhausted my store of reminiscences from the time (November 2007-January 2009) I spent as a teacher at LIKE School, but not quite. I occasionally delve into the files of my computer and look at photos taken in...

Rachel, be who you are!

I am fascinated and repulsed—to equal degrees—by Rachel Dolezal. As the entire world now knows, this 37-year-old European-American woman recently lost her job as leader of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP because of a long charade...

Shame on James J. Kilpatrick

Until rather recently, I had a poor understanding of who James J. Kilpatrick was and what he did during his lifetime (1920-2010). I first knew him as the articulate, conservative commentator on the news show 60 Minutes in the 1970s. He engaged...

I love my bike

In November 2007, just before leaving Austin, I sold my car—a Mazda with about 175,000 miles on the odometer. Since then, I have had no worries about maintenance or insurance, filling up with gasoline or other such mundane matters. I do...