A Commencement Address to the Spring 2018 UF Doctoral Class — For each of the University of Florida’s doctoral commencements, President Kent Fuchs asks a faculty member to deliver an address to the candidates. I was honored to be asked, particularly because I don’t have a PhD myself, and have great appreciation and admiration for those who do. …

With Matt Sheehan and Annie Neimand One of the joys of working in a university is being able to access a trove of scholarship that we couldn’t have dreamed existed as practitioners. As we worked on this project, we often felt like Harry, Hermione and Ron exploring Gringott’s vaults. This…

Great stories live just at the edge of expectation. Consider your favorites. Do they turn out as expected? Not the best ones. Once, when I was on Capitol Hill with a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grantee, we sat down to a meeting with a senate staffer. The grantee had built…

We remember great stories by their rich details: a pair of sparkly red shoes, a jagged scar, a dress of a particular shade of blue topped with a white pinafore, a wardrobe whose back fades away to reveal a new world to explore. But the most compelling stories force us…

If you work in a news organization or as part of a communications team that tells a lot of stories, this will sound too familiar: “We want to tell stories that pull at people’s heartstrings.” And that quest is at least halfway right: scientists at New York University have recently…

Tomorrow a man who has built his identity and fame on hatred and othering will visit our campus. Our parking lots are filled with state police cars. There’s security all over campus. Most classes are canceled. We are on high alert. We are united in our anger, and in our…

In an interview with Rolling Stone about the musical phenomenon Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda describes his moment of insight that hip-hop and the story of the founding fathers are inextricably linked: When a hurricane destroyed Hamilton’s childhood home, he wrote a poem about the storm that was so good that local…

I wish I had known it was the last diaper I would change. The last time I would dial 215–453–1798. The last time Vicki, Jon and I would play Monopoly. The last time Mike, Chris and I would play Scrabble. The last time we would drink in Randy’s garden until…

Whirl means “to hear”. As I waited with the women in the balcony of the whirling hall in Bursa, Turkey, for the dervishes to begin their ethereal ritual turning, I skimmed a brochure a friendly local had offered. He had introduced himself in the courtyard as a literature teacher at…