Tonight is the first night of Passover, as well as Good Friday, and, so I see in the Times, yesterday was a Jain holiday in India. Every year I cobble together my own version of the Passover service — which you can do because the holiday is observed at home. While there is a book [...]

Jim Murphy was gracious enough to come down to Rutgers with me yesterday and to visit with two of my classes: Nonfiction, and YA Materials. In both classes we looked closely at his classic An American Plague and he shared some of the inside stories of how he went about researching all aspects of it. [...]

I’ve been thinking about the Treyvon Martin case, the Stand Your Ground law, the Health Care Debate in the Supreme Court (which, it seems, will turn on Justice Kennedy’s vague but firmly held sense of “liberty”), and — oddly enough — libraries and the internet. It strikes me that the heart of the Stand Your [...]