I first met Shira Barth when she was a student in the middle school where I was a principal, about 11 years ago.  She was shy, bright, had (and has) wonderful midot, and was obviously curious.  I got to know her family over time, both when her younger sister joined the school, and because they…

What’s incredible about Thomas Sowell, a professor at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, is how accurately he diagnosed the intellectual and social foibles of our time with exceptional prescience.  Cosmic Justice, which was the first book I read by him (and was published in 1996), describes and makes sense of the social justice movement and…

 I was drawn to The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement, by Sharon McMahon, because I have a long standing love of American history.  And while this interest was entirely fulfilled in the book, what made this so enjoyable were…

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a constituent element of my growing up, and its consequences are very much a part of the world we are living through now. The standard explanation that I was told growing up (and have recently come across again in a book that references this period) was that Regan’s…

I read Distance, by Hernan Diaz, because I was such a fan of his book Trust. Though I didn’t like it as much, it was powerful in its own way, even if often disturbing and heavy to read.  The book is framed by the main character, Hakan (later known as Hawk), telling the story of…

When I was younger, I didn’t like short stories.  It didn’t feel like enough happened, and they were over just as they were beginning.  I wanted something I could sink into – a series of books was even better.  But over time, their power grew on me.  Authors like Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King…

Sometimes I have read books for the most superficial reasons.  A family member gave one of my kids Time and Again, by Jack Finney, telling her it was one of his favorite books as a kid.  That piqued my interest because this family member and I generally have similar reading interests.  But what really got…

Chovos HaLevavos, Duties of the Heart, the 11th century work by Bahya ibn Paquda, was one of the first mussar books I learned in my late teens/early twenties.  Parts of it made sense to me, and much of it felt too far off from where I was at that stage of my life.  Recently a…

Like many others, I first discovered Nate Silver in the lead up to the 2016 election through his FiveThirtyEight website and podcast, which tracked the US election polls.  And, as with the election cycle, I didn’t pay much attention to him in the intervening years.  But in the leadup to the last election, I heard…