When I first started organizing conversations with my political opposites in 2016, I was simply trying to understand why they elected an abhorrent man to lead our country. After gaining a clearer, though by no means perfect, understanding, I embarked on a multi-state effort to bridge political divides and depolarize…

I’m starting up my salon conversations again. Join me? — My birthday month concludes today. I’ve organized some pretty spectacular celebrations for myself over the years, but recent gatherings have been smaller and more low key, even since before the pandemic stifled socializing. …

Is there a word in English that describes that moment when you think of the perfect reply too late? The French call it l’esprit de l’escalier, which means you have thought of a witty comeback when you reach the bottom of the staircase after having left the party. This happened…

I struggled to write all Sunday afternoon about a day I’d spent sailing around the Chesapeake Bay, laughing with friends on a beautiful early autumn day, reading poetry aloud to each other, goofing off in sarongs, drinking bubbly wine out of spill-proof cups, sharing book recommendations, including one I’d recently…

I’m sitting at the Unicorner Cafe again exactly one year after I arrived in Paris last summer on a self-directed writing residency that was supposed to last six weeks. After three months, I returned to the U.S. with half a book and haven’t written much more since. I won’t finish…

At the small Museum of War and Genocide Victims in Mostar, one Google reviewer wrote: “It was ‘only’ a collection of items from the war.” The walls were lined with plastic vitrines containing personal items like a towel, backpacks, coats, and other plain everyday things. These objects belonged to…

I cursed as I plodded up a gravelly trail through the Accursed Mountains, the Albanian Alps, from Valbona to Theth. The Balkan mountain range was raw, jagged, and patched with glacial moraines. The trail began with a long mostly flat section through a bright white rocky river bed and then…

I stood at the top of a peak in the Accursed Mountains (the Albanian Alps!) a few days ago feeling awe and wonder mixed with sadness for the death of my brilliant, generous, and complicated pal Alberto Gaitan. I cried cathartic tears. And then I cried again a few hours…

What eating olive oil and prosciutto in Tuscany taught me about friendship and human connections — We are sitting on a Tuscan terrace with a glass of sparkling rosé as the sun sets beyond a grove of olive trees behind the villa where my friend Umberto lives with his wife Fulvia and daughter Corrina. Umberto doesn’t usually drink prosecco, probably because it’s from the north and…