From the moment we shared our first cup of coffee, my mother-in-law was my best friend. She’d call us and say to my husband, “You watch Daniel, and I’m going to fly Sharon up here for the weekend, so we can go to ‘Music Circus’.” These were a series of off-Broadway productions. She loved music, loved and she and I attended several together.

When she retired at age 75, we brought her to live with us – healthy and happy. We have a guest apartment down at the end of the hall and frequently, I’d be…

Universe: The 100th Essay

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

From Natural History Magazine, April 2007

“Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices.”

— James…

With the opening of the new Acropolis Museum, Greece has stepped up its efforts in the campaign to return the Parthenon Marbles – and rightly so. Following a visit four years ago to the British Museum, and viewing these artifacts and reading notes of “the head is on display in Athens,” or “the hands are on display in Austria,” really lit my fuse. To me, separating them in that manner was like dismembering a body. Sacrilege! The time is long overdue to bring these treasures back to their rightful home.

For years, the British contended that…

(From FEED ME, edited by Harriet Brown, Ballantine Books)

The diagnosis reached me on Mother’s Day of 1989: My sixty- six year old mother was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. They told us she had only weeks to live.

Within twenty four hours, I had left my husband and our three young children to be at her side and take care of her at her home in Toronto. I didn’t say it out loud, but secretly I believed I might cure her. With my own strange, grief-crazed brand of magical thinking, I knew…

In my early days as an acquisitions editor for F+W Media, I found this quote by David M. Ogilvy:

“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.”

Up until the time I read this quote, I had primarily thought of myself as one of those creative-artistic stereotypes who disdained the numbers and focused on aesthetics, and “art for art’s sake.”

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The birdbath extended from my front porch like the graceful curve of a ballerina’s arm. When I moved into the house, almost two years ago, I saw it as welcoming, the polite gesture of after you from a kind hostess. At the time, I had no idea that this wide flat bowl, perched on a pedestal of intertwining branches, would become a symbol of transformation. But I always liked how it looked, and warmed to the prospect of birds splashing and drinking in its generous bowl.

When I first moved into the house, the winter rains…

Spread your ashes yesterday at Bolinas, where you wanted. The date was my choice: the fortieth day after your death. I selected it for the lore: Buddhist souls, they say, leave the earth and continue on into the circle of transmigration. For Christians, it’s the day Jesus ascended. Seemed as good a time as any to let you go.

A storm threatened offshore, vast blue masses of cloud in high winds, the beach hazed and empty but for us. Everyone came wrapped in weather gear: Marcie and Margaret, Jackie and Vivian, Laura, Dawn, Steph, Loreto and…

I conceived Blood of Paradise after reading Philoctetes, a spare and relatively obscure drama by Sophocles. In the original, an oracle advises the Greeks that victory over the Trojans is impossible without the bow of Herakles. Unfortunately, it’s in the hands of Philoctetes, whom the Greeks abandoned on a barren island ten years earlier, when he was bitten by a venomous snake while the Achaean fleet harbored briefly on its way to Troy.

Odysseus, architect of the desertion scheme, must now return, reclaim the bow, and bring both the weapon and its owner to Troy. For…

By Renee Comer Miller

I wasn’t going to watch it. My sister actually worked the phone lines. I, on the other hand, was pretty uninterested. Maybe I just didn’t want to hear. Maybe I’m done with it. Maybe I hate it so much I want to turn it off.

But cancer won’t turn off. Instead it just keeps killing more than half a million people a year. I didn’t know that before tonight. I should have.

I am a two-time cancer survivor.

I was 26 years old and pregnant…

written by Guest Author: Erin Kennedy

“What else do you do?”

He says it with such condescension that I think of slicing his ashy skin and bleeding the arrogance from him.

I know what he’s asking. He is giving me the opportunity to detail the achievements of my life, to justify my existence before serving the second course. He wants me to prove that I am more than his waitress.

I know the answer he is looking for. He wants me to entertain his company with the background of my…