Director’s Column

It was the Fourth of July and the sacred music wouldn’t play. Hundreds of runners, cued up at the start line for the annual Firecracker 5K, conducted at Cascades Park, grew agitated — at 8 a.m., it was hot already…

Kaizsa (rhymes with Asia) is a remarkable black woman who somehow simultaneously managed home, motherhood, work, internships and studies on her way to the bachelor’s degree in strategic communication that she collected in May. She is the kind of person…

Finding myself one tweet over the line, I very deliberately, consciously turned off the news and reported to a weekly gathering of optimistic, grounded people who are close to the earth. They are the kind of folks who would line…

Paul Simon, of all people, turned me on to it, Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson’s remarkable assessment of life on our planet, “Half-Earth.” Writing in The New York Times, Simon rates the book “compulsory reading” for all who care…

My mother is well shielded from the sun in her bucket hat, long-sleeved gingham windbreaker and long cotton pants. She is seated at the bow of a heavy, open fiberglass fishing skiff and, while her eyes are shielded by sunglasses,…

There are those playing-field-leveling events — natural disasters and the holiday season, for example — that bring people together and infuse all involved with a desire to make a contribution, to help out in some way. Hours after Hermine blew…

In North Miami, police respond to a 911 report of a suicidal man with a gun. Arriving at the scene, they encounter two men in the middle of an intersection and order them to lie down with their hands raised.…

Shari Cakir Brogans, as worn by men in latter 19th-century America, were cobbled, I was to find out, such that the left was indistinguishable from the right. Too, their hard soles made it hard to obtain purchase on surfaces the…

Nearby my apartment is a two-rut road that leads gradually uphill through ash and pine and magnolia to a power line easement. Turkey frequent the trail and deer and one day I satisfied myself that I heard a bear. As…

You saw it, probably — the television commercial in which Bob Dylan carries on a conversation with a gizmo that represents Watson, the IBM computer system that is said “to mirror the same learning processes people have through the power of…

When I first met Joseph Kuciauskas eight years ago, he was able to operate the joy stick on his wheelchair and, surrounding a pencil with a fist, he could, painstakingly, produce a legible script. His muscular dystrophy had contorted his…