According to the American Cancer Society, about 600 adolescents, aged 15 to 19, die from cancer each year.

In 2017, my daughter, Ana, was one of them.

Ana was sick for four and a half years. During most of that time, even as her cancer progressed, I didn’t think that she was going to die from her disease.

I thought that she would beat it. I thought that her tenacious will to live would help her overcome the odds, and that scientists or doctors would invent something miraculous to shrink her tumors and restore her health.

When it eventually became…

I was at work on the morning of September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I was sitting in my office in Kingston, New York, a town located about 90 miles north of Manhattan, when a colleague told me about it. I’d initially assumed it was a small plane that had flown into the building by mistake.

Eighteen minutes later a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. …

It took me 19 years to love my house and now I may lose it.

I don’t know when the ash trees died. By my estimate, it was at least eight years ago, maybe longer. That means we let them stand, dead, for nearly a decade because we could not afford to remove them.

This past spring, I finally called the town to see if there was anything they could do. Two of the trees were precariously balanced near the road. I could scarcely afford to have them both removed, but luckily I didn’t have to come up with the…

An email from my daughter’s school arrived in my inbox at 1:19 pm on October 1st that took my breath away. It was an unsigned announcement notifying parents that, due to severe budget cuts, all students in the district must resume in-person classes on November 9th.

This contradicted what we’d been told (repeatedly) since September. Namely, that her high school would remain completely virtual for the entirety of the 2020–2021 school year.

I’d tried to process the information without panicking and, after reading the email several times, found a link at the very bottom that read, simply, “Remote Instruction Continuation.”…

THIS IS US

The first playdate was the product of an infant/toddler reading hour at my local library in the fall of 2002. I’d been freshly laid off from a dot-com job that had consumed me. My daughter Ana was 18 months old.

I’d been adrift, aimless, caught in the purgatory between unemployment and whatever came next. Suddenly I was in the company of a toddler all day, every day.

And so I found myself in the library at 11 a.m. …

I recently came across a blog post by a guy named Bob Lefsetz, a music industry critic and pundit. In the post, Lefsetz expresses his disdain for services like Patreon and Substack that enable writers and artists to earn money from their work.

Lefsetz’s bio notes that he’s been publishing a newsletter about music industry trends for 25 years. He was featured in the LA Times four years ago, so this guy is not no one. In the LA Times piece, Ethan Varian describes Lefsetz as having “an irreverant and boisterous take on the business of popular music.”

Varian’s piece…

(And His Volunteer Army)

Last Wednesday, at exactly 11:10 am, I watched a pharmacist place a bandaid on my 16-year-old daughter’s arm. He stuck it neatly beneath the bunched up sleeve of her bulky sweater.

“There you go, sweetie,” he said gently. “Next time wear a t-shirt.” He smiled beneath his mask, deposited the needle in a red bin, and turned to the next teenager waiting to be stuck with the Pfizer vaccine.

Dr. Neal Smoller is a holistic pharmacist. He owns Village Apothecary, an independent pharmacy in Woodstock, NY. For the past four months, Smoller has been on a…

First, scope out a quiet neighborhood where your teenager can practice driving with minimal distractions. The road should be wide enough that she doesn’t feel squeezed by oncoming traffic. Take note of potential obstacles — pedestrians, cyclists, off-leash dogs, that sort of thing.

Quiet locales with meandering cross streets are perfect. They’ll remind her of where she grew up, so she can begin to make a positive connection with leaving you forever.

Once you’ve settled on the perfect neighborhood, pull over and take a deep slow breath. Gaze at an elaborate wooden swingset in someone’s backyard and wonder what the…