About the author
Empathy at the Olympics
In Beijing 2008, the morning of his preliminary heat in the 400-meter hurdles, Félix Sánchez of the Dominican Republic woke up to news that his grandmother, who raised him, had died. Sánchez, the defending Olympic gold-medalist, ended up placing 22nd overall. “I ran terribly. I had cried the whole day. I was very emotional,” he recalled. "After that Olympics, I made a promise that I was going to win a medal fo...
The Language Aesthetic & The Phantom Tollbooth
I went back to reading Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth recently, the same as I have so many times. And I found myself, as always, overcome with delight. First published in 1961, the story follows a boy named Milo, a rather etiolated fellow suffering from a youthful ennui familiar to us all. The first page explains: “There once was a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just...
