The day the bombing began in Baghdad, my daughter came home from kindergarten and said, “We’re at war with Iraq, right Daddy?” Later that evening, she stopped in the midst of her piano practice to ask, “Daddy, how can music change the world?” Her thinking was, I knew, p

St. Patrick’s Day in New York this year was about short-sleeved shirts hauled out of storage and men and women sweating while blowing into bagpipes. In some places along Fifth Avenue, young men and women were inspired to talk of summer plans, filled with promise. The women wore sleeveless shir

Two friends have taken their own lives within a short time: one by consuming more of the drugs that were killing her anyway; the other, also enslaved to drugs, who hastened his death with a bullet. The phone rings: there has been a suicide. A life is ended. Just like that.The avoidability of these d

My mind, like the minds of many Americans, could easily be consumed with thoughts of attacking Iraq. There is no end of opinions, information and disinformation about why it should or should not happen. What’s interesting is that the more we learn about incremental Iraqi compliance and opposit

Within a recent five-day period, I marched twice in Washington, D.C. One march opposed a U.S. attack on Iraq; the other opposed legal abortion. According to partisan politics, these causes have nothing in common. But I went because I believe they share a fundamental similarity: both claim that human

Of the many epithets flung at the French in recent weeks, one particularly colorful phrase found its way into the vernacular: “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” This delightful slander first appeared in an episode of “The Simpsons,” where it was meant as a joke, and then was