Because his art is such a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious law firms, or opening their own m...
I've never had any summer lovin'. And I've never had any school year lovin', either. I've never had a boyfriend. I've never hooked up with a guy. And this morning, on my Internet browser, an article popped up about women marrying themselves. Even my ...
Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the fait...
I fell in love with Erica Kane the summer before my freshman year of high school. Like all red-blooded teen American boys, I'd come home from water polo practice and eat a box of Entenmann's Pop'Ems donut holes in front of the TV while obsessively fa...
It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book...
When I'm not the Tiger Mom, I'm a professor at Yale Law School, and if one thing is clear to me from years of teaching, it's that there are many ways to produce fabulous kids. I have amazing students; some of them have strict parents, others have len...
The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to ...
One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good,...
I didn't really spend much time with anyone my own age during high school because I believed my true calling would be representing New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, and if that didn't work out, I could always fall back on becoming an Olympic pole vaulte...
They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clot...
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal begi...
Goose neck is a delicacy. You have to at least try it. In fancy restaurants people pay up to fifty dollars a plate for this stuff.' And at our house we were force-fed it for free. Just another irony of life.
Reverence is an that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.
The world was so unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its s...
I'm not even going to tell you what I think about what just happened in there. But I know it sucked and I have no idea why you aren't crying right now, but I know your heart hurts, and maybe even your pride. So fuck school. We’re going for ice crea...
Lilac curled her upper lip in a dead-eyed sneer, and it made my skin crawl. The girl looked like she might fillet me and have me for a snack later. She made the Dale R. Fielding High School Cheer Squad look like Barney and Friends, and I vowed to giv...
I didn’t know what was more disturbing—the fact that something was obviously wrong, or that three faculty members of the world’s premiere spy school had forgotten to lock the door.
First, psychotherapy is an art. It is not a science (the human-beings-are-laboratory-rats mentality of the behaviorist notwithstanding). A friend of mine, a philosopher of esthetics, defines art as: anything that people treat as art. So it is with ps...
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat ano...
Cope? Adapt? Uh, no. These are military kids. They roll with it. I once asked a new student, 'See any familiar faces?' She pointed out various kids and replied, 'Seattle, Tampa, Okinawa, New Jersey.' For military dependents school is literally a non-...
Compressing her lips together, she gave Mark a baleful glance, eyes flashing pure malice. If he wanted his lips anywhere near hers he’d better be prepared to do battle. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about,’ said Mark, as the corner of his li...
