In the year of the great Covid-19 pandemic, the only certainty has been economic uncertainty. One of the early IPO filings of 2021 is the female-driven, Austin-based online dating site Bumble, which easily raised $2.2 billion and sky-rocketed 80% in its first trading. Though the dating site industry has not historically been a serious contender […]
One ordinary day in The Sun City I took out on foot into the belly of Las Tienditas near the heart of downtown El Paso, Texas. Aptly named for hundreds of street vendors, mercados, jewelers, and other sellers of everything a person could possibly need, this “Little Stores” region is the last American plot of […]
It was the 1 AM phone call that nobody wants. Mama cell. From a dead sleep to my greeting of what’s wrong, the reason for the call was the most bizarre thing we could have ever imagined. My sister’s house was burning down. Just hours before, I had arrived from visiting my Mama three hours […]
It was a late October night when my best friend Heather and I made the pilgrimage to school to meet the bus after a long day of footballing with our boys. Two Southern Belles giggling and recapping the day’s experience, we were an inseparable pair of wives and moms without a care in the world […]
Do all the men of the universe a favor and wear your hair like that for the rest of your life. In the rolling, wooded hills of Hamilton, Georgia, it was a cold Monday in December 2007. As the three sisters scurried around the house getting ready for Emma’s wedding, the letter arrived postmarked November […]
Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? — Economics Teacher, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off There once was a young graduate assistant who had the honor of teaching a biology class at a highly prestigious university. This revered university also happened to have an extremely renowned athletics program. After a few days of teaching the first class, the assistant was […]
“I once was Casey Anthony,” while her daughter Caylee’s blood cries out from the ground, “I know the truth.” — The Atonement This “blood crying out” mentioned in my July 2011 column entitled The Atonement referenced the first recorded murder in human history (Genesis 4) when Cain killed his brother Abel. Until now, it was the […]
Years ago, when I first was invited to write this column, my main objective was to write about things that make people Google. This was during a new era of the information age in which social media was spreading like wildfire, bringing the ends of the earth together into one anothers’ living rooms like never […]
Today as I pen this column, it is a Monday in every sense of the word. Nothing says “Monday” like a return to work after a holiday. They could have named it Mundane, but that would have been too nice of a word. If any ordinary Monday could be aptly defined as mundane, then surely […]
The cardboard box lay open before me as I contemplated my words, scissors still in hand. I pulled the plastic-wrapped package out carefully, not because it was breakable, but because we were about to have THE TALK. “Okay son, before I pull these pants out of the package, you need to understand one thing and […]
In what will most likely be known to historians as the last greatest friendship between a conservative and a liberal, Americans will forever memorialize the snapshot in time of Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia and his longtime friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the back of an elephant waving to a nearby crowd. It is Justice Scalia’s […]
While political analysts have been scratching their collective heads over the 2016 race to the White House, for the average political spectator, the fissures and fractures of a broken establishment, at least for the GOP, became glaringly apparent on the evening of President Obama’s final State of the Union. Their pick for a Republican response […]
With just three months to live, David Johnston received the most shocking email of his life. This was a name from the past he could never forget due to all that had happened. It was his college romance Beverly Martin. In 1956, young David’s romantic relationship with his then girlfriend had resulted in a pregnancy. […]
“…But it seems one mustn’t judge [books] by th’ outside. This is a puzzlin’ world.” —Mr. Tulliver, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot Never judge a book by its cover is a commonly used idiom of the English language adapted from George Eliot’s fictional account of one Jeremy Tulliver in the 1860 novel The […]