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Happy Halloween!

My two kids, ready for trick-or-treating tonight! Clara is a fairy princess, and Charlie is Max from Where the Wild Things Are, in a costume that my wife made specifically for him. Someday I will actually read that book and appreciate her handiwork even more. But she wasn’t finished when Charlie’s costume was complete. Clara…

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I admire this violent, malicious man.

On a good day, former New England Patriots and current Washington Redskins safety Brandon Meriweather is a hard-nosed, hard hitting football player. Those days seem few and far between. More often, Meriweather is a dirty player with a disregard for the safety of his opponents. During his tenure in New England, I watched him make…

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Ending the engagement is sometimes the only correct choice

A question recently asked of Slate’s Dear Prudence: Q. Always Take the Wife’s Side?: I’m about to get married and am caught in an argument between my fiancée and my parents. This will be the first time in over five years that our whole family will be together. My parents want to take a picture…

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Beyond the Margins today!

I have a piece in Beyond the Margins today about the unexpected (and almost unbelievable) benefits of publishing novels. Enjoy!

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Lionel Shriver needed to take better inventory before she lamented the tragedy of her career in The New Republic.

Bestselling author Lionel Shriver has been criticized this week for a piece she wrote in The New Republic in which she complains about the amount of publicity and the demands on her time that an author of her stature endures in today’s literary environment. She writes (I suggest you skim): Thus, at a time I…

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Frozen carrots on a stick

This is an excellent reminder about how fortunate we are. I think I’ll show it to my students the next time they complain that the cafeteria has run out of chocolate milk. The video is great, but the image alone speaks a thousand words.

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Harry Dicks is almost worse.

Late last summer, a judge in the town of Newport, Tennessee ordered that a 7-month old boy’s name be changed from Messiah to Martin, saying that “it’s a title that has only been earned by one person … Jesus Christ.” This decision was eventually overturned and the judge was reprimanded for her obvious religious bias.…

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Baby pushing baby

My wife played with the stroller that my son is pushing as a child. I have nothing like that from my childhood. I have nothing at all from my childhood except for a single stuffed animal. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be standing in your childhood home, watching your children play…

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What teachers know about bedtimes

New, compelling research on the connection between sleep and student success: Researchers reporting in the journal Pediatrics studied more than 10,000 kids when they were three, five and seven years old and compared reports of behavior issues to their bedtimes. Kids with irregular sleep were more likely to have lower scores on tests that measured…

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