I’ve been with my wife for more than half of my life. It’s a happy marriage, but it was made a lot happier after I realized that one of the biggest sources of friction in our marriage was something I was doing that I thought would actually reduce the friction…

I went to a funeral today. This was the twelfth funeral I’ve attended in the last ten years, and each one is another reminder of the most overlooked privilege of being a male. The funeral was for one of my neighbors. He was only sixty years old. He started his…

I am a teacher at a private school in Chicago. Like many private school teachers in the city, the most common profession among my students’ parents is “city employee.” Specifically, about two dozen of my students’ parents are Chicago police officers or Chicago public schools teachers. There are three reasons…

When I was eleven years old, in 1991, a flea market took up permanent residence in an abandoned warehouse on the very edge of the distance I was allowed to ride my bike at the time. I ended up going to that flea market every weekend (weather permitting) for almost…

In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the expansion and changing of certain words in order to help push agendas. …

Over the last 15 years, as I rolled down the runway of adulthood and reached my middle-aged cruising altitude, I’ve noticed something: the people who left the airport a few years behind me seem to be hitting a lot of storms on their way up, and the turbulence is really…

My city and state governments are not going to let this crisis go to waste. — I live in Chicago, IL… A solidly-Democratic city that pulls the rest of the state to the blue side of the spectrum most of the time. At the city level, the real elections here are the Democratic primaries. The general elections are just formalities. …

As The Estimated Deaths From Coronavirus Continues To Drop, The Number Of Conspiracy Theories About The Crisis Rises. — I’m writing this on Friday evening, April 10, 2020. The general quarantine here in Chicago began on March 14, but there was a gradual winding down and cancelling of events for two weeks prior to that. In those first weeks in March, we saw what was happening in Northern Italy…

You Discovered Your Atheism In Seventh Grade? That’s Something We Catholic School Teachers Have Never Heard Before… — I’ve always taught at Catholic middle schools, which means I get a lot of the young teens who are trying to rebel but suck at it. …