Later this month — April 24 — Armenians around the world will pause to mourn the 1.5 million of our ancestors who were systematically annihilated by the Ottoman Empire in one of the 20th century’s first genocides. Under the violence and fog of the First World War, three out of every four Armenians living in […]
Tag Archives: The Light in the Ruins
This seems to be the month when I am writing about the great women who raised me. Last week I wrote about my extraordinary and eccentric Aunt Rose Mary. Well, in another era, tomorrow would have marked the start of Annalee-Mas. Annalee-Mas was the season surrounding my mother Annalee’s birthday. Her birthday was not until […]
I lived in Florida when I was a teenager, so I know a little about living with a seashell-obsessed crazy person: My mother. We moved to Florida from Connecticut, and there was nothing that my mother thought could not be improved with seashells. I am not making up what I am about to tell you: […]
Once again, Valentine’s Day is nearing, that moment each year when we celebrate what it means to be in love. The traditional gifts? Cards and flowers and candy. Really uncomfortable lingerie. Some people, however, try to transcend tradition. I asked readers this year for some of the worst or strangest Valentine’s gifts they had ever […]
This past week we officially put 2013 into the history books. Looking back, we all learned to twerk. Kim and Kanye and Kate and William had babies. Alec got mad. So did Reese. And the real news? Tornadoes, a cataclysmic civil war, and a terrorist attack in Boston. A health care revolution ushered in by […]
As this year winds down, I realize I missed a big story: Not health care. Not the government shutdown. Not even the fact that Rome was besieged with poop from migrating birds – birds which, according to a city council spokeswoman, had been eating olives before flying over the Eternal City, “so their mess becomes […]
There is absolutely nothing in the world I like more than calling strangers at their homes over dinner and asking for money. There is just no faster way to make friends and influence people. And so I might be calling you on Tuesday night – especially if you live in Vermont. I will be dialing […]
As a Vermonter, I try to have Cal Coolidge’s back. I do this because he was a Vermont-born United States President, because we graduated from the same college, and because he endured a horrific personal tragedy that some historians suggest shaped the last four of his five years in office. A month after he was […]
We are fast approaching the holiday season, that time of the year when we are all a little kinder and a little more generous, as long as that kindness and generosity doesn’t involve sacrificing a parking space within sight of the shopping mall. It’s that moment on the calendar when we want to be particularly […]
Halloween is but days away, that night of the year when the streets are filled with children dressed up as ghosts and goblins and John Boehner. (Trust me, you won’t be able to schedule five minutes at a tanning salon between now and November 1.) It is also, alas, that evening when many of us […]
