Having recently returned from the Middle East, I was no longer a neophyte traveler. Even so, I can say honestly that going to new places far from Texas was thrilling and quite edifying. This four-part trip required a good deal of advance...
You might think that since I graduated from the University of Texas, lived in proximity to its campus for more than three decades and wrote four books about it, I would be among the most gung-ho of Longhorns. Before stating why that is not...
This is being written not long after the 50th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy, which caused me to read a 700-page biography, which led to further research. I am not inclined to worship at the shrine of JFK—Camelot?...
Easily my favorite family member is a person to whom I am not related by blood but marriage. My brother’s father-in-law is named George, and he is not even my sister-in-law’s father but her stepfather. George is well-traveled...
Way back in the early 1990s, I had a GF whose middle name was Jean, so that is what I will call her here. She was an intelligent person, with a master’s degree and a high-paying job at IBM. She also had a trust fund and a comfortable...
Everybody liked Terry Cashman’s 1981 song, “Talkin' Baseball (Willie, Mickey and the Duke).” It was a catchy tune, jam-packed with references to some of the game’s greats—including Grover Cleveland Alexander...
Just around the corner from my office building is a very interesting and unique establishment: LBC, which stands for Lecture & Broadcasting for Culture. It is the brainchild of Rim Cheol-Woong, a multifaceted man whom I will try to...
Let's call her Miss B. She and I had enjoyed an all-too-brief romance more than 20 years earlier. Of the many blunders in my life, leaving her probably ranks in the top five. I had come to regret it deeply and thought that visiting her...
I have trained myself to be suspicious about hyperbole. Everywhere we turn, there is a seemingly authoritative person claiming that something or someone is/was the most this, the best that, and so on. A blip was raised on my anti-blather radar...
During a hot summer day in 1975 in Nacogdoches, Texas, I was talking with a neighbor named Jim. He was a woebegone individual who drank too much. His story was a strange mixture of complaint and braggadocio. I listened until I could stand no...
One night in the summer of 1993, I flew—not literally—from Cairo, Egypt to Manama, Bahrain. It was the worst flight of my life. There was no danger per se, but it was very uncomfortable in that cramped airplane with air so...
Exactly a century ago, in 1913, American librarians began calling the New York Times “the newspaper of record.” They perceived that its circulation, editorial and news-gathering capabilities were unmatched, at least in the USA...
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