IN THE CLOSING MINUTES of the NCAA lacrosse championship game between Virginia and Maryland on Memorial Day, emotions were running so high on the sidelines that there was apparently a heated verbal confrontation between the two coaching staffs. Although the skirmish was out of view of television cameras, one of…

The asterisk is a humble punctuation mark. Unlike the period, it doesn’t stop anything. Unlike the comma, it doesn’t even slow things down. It doesn’t shout like an exclamation point or make you puzzle like the question mark. Instead, the asterisk usually sits quietly at the end of a sentence…

As I watched videos of the first COVID-19 vaccine being administered throughout the country this month, I remembered the moment, 65 years earlier, when I trooped from my second-grade classroom to the “sick room” at the my little school in rural West Virginia. It was April 21, 1955. The U.S…

All these decades later, the memory is clear as day. We’re sitting in right field at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. We are just to the right of the high screen where we not only have an unobscured view of the field but also have the chance to catch a home run…

For us practicing hypochondriacs, this has an especially stressful year. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first began listing COVID-19 symptoms, we immediately began to worry, even more than usual, about every sneeze and every cough. We were terrified when a trip up the stairs left us even…

When John Merritt, the late Tennessee State University football coach, addressed the Nashville Chamber of Commerce weekly luncheon one day in 1972, he made a surprising declaration. “Integration is killin’ me,” he said. Momentarily taken aback, the all-white audience recovered quickly and laughed uproariously. Merritt had to be kidding. Didn’t…