Socrates might have us believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, but plenty goes unexamined in this life.  Or maybe we know it is there, and we look at it from time to time, but we’d rather not.  We’d rather not see the clutter in our own houses.  We have other things on [...]

You are an English major because you don’t know what you want to do with your life, and reading and writing are like breathing to you, the easiest paths to sure As.  You haven’t particularly devoted yourself to them.  They just are what you do without much effort.  Your mother read to you a lot. [...]

Thanks to the Huffington Post, I found this video of last week’s so-called Klan rally at Ole Miss. Watch it. Watch it through to the end. Ole Miss probably has the longest and most painful history of race issues of any university in our state. They’re the school known to the world for closing their [...]

I was eleven years old before I understood that the N word was offensive.  I’ve told this before to friends, and some have denied that this is even possible, but it was the 1970s in a small town in Mississippi.  I had been punished for saying words like gosh and darn and even fudge in [...]

Once my nephew got in trouble at school for clowning around.  His mother did the only thing she could do and told him to quit that.  He said, “But you don’t know how hard I worked to become the class clown.” I feel his pain.  Entertaining others is a big job.  Attempting to do it [...]