Category: College Admissions

“Res ipsa loquitur” means “the thing speaks for itself.” A Miami woman buys knock off pocketbooks and returns them to a designer store. She keeps the real pocketbooks in her closet. This thing speaks for itself. But I don’t know what it is trying to say. The fake pocketbooks are

In the late 1960s, bus station food impressed us as having more to do with “bus station” than with “food.” Our perception was corroborated across days, states, and bus stops. Rather than suffer the gastronomic indignities of yet another questionable skillet, my buddy and I determined, in the decades before

Stephen Hawking’s publisher is said to have told the astrophysicist not to put any equations in A Brief History of Time. Each mathematical symbol will cost you half your readers. Or as my younger daughter puts it, “nobody likes the math thing.” If e = mc^2-–an engaging relationship between energy,

“Steady as she goes” said Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Indeed it is a foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of small minds. To my knowledge, Emerson never had anything to say about a sensible consistency. Of course, Emerson only had four children. And it frequently seems

“Dear Gemente Stein” my letter began. “I would like to participate in your triathlon.” In 1985, I had more discretionary income then sense and thought nothing of traveling to the Netherlands to plunge into 63° water before biking and running over hill and dale. The advert in the athletics magazine

Medieval doctors had a sweet gig. No downside, really. Their powers of prediction were pretty much perfect. “You are desperately ill,” a doctor might say. “Undoubtedly, you will soon die from this mortal disease.” And the doctor was usually right on. Sick people had a pronounced tendency to die. What

Eight years ago, my buddy Bruce got me started writing these blog posts. “It will be good for business,” he said. “And you love to write.”  I do enjoy communicating—“pontificating” is such a negative word. I like sharing my views on parenting, learning differences, college admissions, therapeutic issues. Bruce and

If going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car, then putting this balding, paunchy, 62-year-old author is a Miami Dolphins’ uniform doesn’t make me a competitive NFL player. You know the expression, “several bulbs shy of a chandelier”? I

My older son is coaching developmentally disabled children. He says his players are awesome—motivated, cheerful, willing. His players typically have cognitive impairments as well as physical disabilities, but they love to play.  Basketball seems to be a universal language—even for kids with expressive and receptive language impairments. You have not

“Men have died from time to time but not for love,” Shakespeare pointed out, balancing irony with understatement. Homo sapiens over the years have indeed had a distinct tendency to slaughter one another. A more insightful author than I could suggest reasons for the rivers of blood over the eons.