A Weathered Plaque, a Vanished World, and the Return of Mrs. Meadows A few weeks ago, I met with the head of the ProHuman Foundation and its director of communications. They showed me a graphic for a new campaign. Their goal is to restore the faded plaque at the Lincoln Memorial marking the site where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream”

January 25–29, 2026 I have come back to Paris again, this time walking with sticks, slower than I once walked and attentive in a way speed never allowed. The only people I pass are the very old, most of whom walk lopsided with canes. Paris has been part of my life since my twenties. It has seen me married, broken, open, reassembled, tested, loved, and

Reading Siddhartha Across Fifty Years There are moments in a life when something becomes clear in a way that leaves no room for avoidance. Nothing external has changed. No new information has been introduced. Yet something inside shifts, and what was once easy to overlook suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. What matters is not the moment itself but what follows—whether we turn toward what we

In the summer of 1962, at Camp Greenhaven in western Massachusetts, I learned something about myself I had never suspected. Not gradually, not through reflection, but all at once, in a moment that I resisted with everything I had. I was a waiter at the camp, which meant carrying overloaded trays through a dining hall filled with impatient, grabbing, shouting campers. But that wasn’t why

There’s a place I visit without going anywhere. It usually begins when I’m reading. I’m holding a book, and something in it—a word, a sentence, or an image—shifts my mind sideways. Suddenly, I’m no longer in my house. I’m in a library next to a pond. A white building sat atop a small hill. The simple columns made it seem as if it had been

I know now what instinct compelled me to search for a photograph from forty-six years ago.  I was alone in Paris two months ago, a city where memory lingers—memory her mind no longer holds. I write the stories with her, about her, and now, increasingly, without her. The photograph was taken in a small apartment at 65 Boulevard de Sébastopol. The high ceilings are accented