After I got a University of Texas diploma on May 22, 1976, the decades have rolled by. That’s one form of distance, another being the 6,000 or so miles separating the USA from Korea. If the bonds between me and my alma mater are not as strong and...
When are Mother’s Day and Father’s Day? I could not tell you to save my life. Such artificially designated days have never registered with me. I choose to honor good parenting at any time of the year, and this is the day for me to bow deeply to...
There was no excuse, none whatsoever, for my having failed to vote in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. The USA is a participatory democracy, and expats only have to take a few simple steps in order to cast a ballot. Thrice I did...
In the spring of 1983, I started working on my first book. It pertained to racial integration of Southwest Conference football. I was deeply disappointed when I learned that John Westbrook had died. What guts it must have taken to walk onto the...
For more than 100 days now, people in the once-lovely town of Portland, Oregon have been rioting, burning, looting, vandalizing, terrorizing and protesting in the name of “social justice.” Nothing they have done upsets me more than...
Frank Sinatra recorded “There Used to Be a Ballpark” in 1973. If this does not rank among classics like “My Way,” “Strangers in the Night” and “New York, New York,” it was still a good one. The song captured how a community had lost its baseball...
Back in 2013, my student Juliana Kim spoke enthusiastically about skiing at Vivaldi Park, 63 kilometers east of Seoul, every winter with her husband and children. Whether they visited the place in summer for its equally famous water resort, I am...
Huge and well-rendered murals of George Floyd can now be found in such places as Houston, Texas; Gaza, Palestine; Nairobi, Kenya; Idlib, Syria; Manchester, England; Karachi, Pakistan; and Belfast, Northern Ireland. In more than one, he is drawn...
My flight from Cairo, Egypt to Manama, Bahrain in the summer of 1993 was memorable for four reasons: (1) Never have I been in such a cramped airplane, (2) there were no smoking restrictions whatsoever, (3) we had a 30-minute layover in Doha...
Any football or basketball coach who wants to win and keep his job is going to put the best players out on the field or court. This is as it should be. Nevertheless, I get sick of mono-cultural sports. A quick glance at virtually any college or...
Kindly allow me to begin by reprising my Facebook post dated June 3, 2020: “I have a question for Thomas Lane, J.A. Kueng and Tou Thao. You saw your colleague, Derek Chauvin, with his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes, 46 seconds on...
Two months ago, I was immersed in a book about the Wright brothers, builders and pilots of the world’s first motor-operated airplane. The author, David McCullough, did a fine job with one exception: He made no reference to Orville or Wilbur’s...
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