I’m the person who is asked regularly, in both professional and personal contexts by people more adult than I am, whether Twitter is something anyone should care about.  Those who know me can guess what my answer has been. …until I had a conversation with my sister, less than a week after our father’s passing, [...]

A new website enters the world: United We Learn This is a small, swift project I worked on with some good people in the Chicago area. United We Learn asked for a clean, serious design to feature their new documentary film about public education in Illinois.  They have been deploying some heavy activities all without [...]

I am sorry to tell you this, but you’re not going to make it. Your menu is in a middle-school report folder, and features too many dishes for any of them to be especially good.  There are two copies of the salads menu and three copies of the desserts menu in various places throughout the [...]

Saying less seems to be what I can do best right now.  Some of you have tried this pepper sauce, and maybe even have experienced it as a significant connection to my father.  Sharing the recipe is another memorial to him.  He’d made a new batch, hotter than his usual, in a giant jar, just [...]

From Wiesel’s Souls on Fire, He takes a step forward, he stretches out his hand to a friend, a companion, a stranger perhaps.  Refusing merely to speak of love, friendship, and truth, he also decides to live them.  He rejects mediocrity, and evil, vulgarity, falsehood, and easy solutions. . . If he fails, no great [...]

My father passed suddenly, of a heart-attack, on Saturday.  He was gone before they reached the hospital. Saturday night, I went looking for this poem.  On Monday, an old friend of our family brought by a large bowl of fresh figs, picked that morning from the house of one of our old neighbors.  They were [...]