Happy Ides of March! On this day, March 15, 44 BC, 2066 years ago, Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome. Forgive the shameless plug for my book on the subject, The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination. Called “brilliant” by the Wall Street Journal and “an absolutely marvelous read” by The […]

How do we educate future leaders? How do we educate future citizens? In fact, how do we educate young people more generally? We teachers often think about these things. For serious students, a college major can chart a lifetime career’s course, so it matters what you study. Nowadays it’s common to choose STEM over the […]

Americans have more than usual reason to think about successors. Our current president, Joe Biden, is likely to run for reelection in 2024. He recently turned 80. His predecessor, Donald Trump, has announced that he is running for a second term in 2024; he is 76. I wish both men long and healthy lives, but […]

In my last post I wrote about two great leaders, ancient and modern, Socrates and Martin Luther King. Each of them was inspired by a sense of mission. Each had what President George H.W. Bush once described in frustration as “the vision thing.” The president was a man of many talents, but the ability to […]

This week we celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., nearly a century after his birth in 1929. Dr. King was the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, the force that did as much as anything in my lifetime to change America for the better. He was eloquent, far-sighted, and courageous, risking […]

“Every beginning is hard,” so the saying goes. Maybe that’s not true of the New Year, which most people ease into joyously, nervously, and often drunkenly. Or, if the saying is true, perhaps it refers only to hangovers, and here in the northern hemisphere, to cold weather, and everywhere to the difficulty of sticking to […]