Sentence of Dave

I started watching Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, but it seemed anecdotal in its evidence, without any real the...

The burly cashier at Stop and Shop told the dude in front of me that his total, $8.68, was a "palindrome," and that sometimes-- on...

For the next ten years I am going to exclusively listen to jazz and classical music-- no rock or punk-- so that my kids have the opportunity...

Here is Ali's contribution to the incredibly popular recurring series I like to call Your Favorite Story About Dave (Fit to Print on a R...

When we begin Hamlet in my English classes, I like to assume the role of the skeptical scholar Horatio; I force my students to ask me if I ...

This article makes the new anti-addiction drug sound pretty great (no urge! no craving!) but what happens when the addictive people who nee...

It took someone far smarter than me-- the polymath Steven Johnson -- to explain what I am doing here at Sentence of Dave . . . though you wo...

Note to self: do not eat a salmon burger before a night soccer game (and you'd think I'd have learned my lesson about heavy meals be...

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice , the characters are bound to each other both by their inherent status and by the contracts they...

We recently reviewed Terry's Favorite Story About Dave , and today we will tackle Stacey's Favorite Story About Dave, and this story...

The key to a happy marriage is this: when you hear your wife pull into the driveway, get off the couch, race to the kitchen, and start doing...

John Franzen swings for the fences with his new novel Freedom , and in a sense his Tom Wolfe-esque survey of America-- through the eyes of a...

A Jordanian, an Indian, a Cop, a Slovakian Chemist, a Sicilian, and Red Headed White Guy walk into a bar . . . but it's not a joke; it i...

So I'm eating lunch in the English office and this kid walks in without knocking-- which is totally unacceptable-- and he picks up this...

In Imperial Grunts , a fairly positive review of American special forces around the world, Robert Kaplan does remind us that we could have ...

My wife had a long stressful day at work on Monday (she went to the wrong school for her work shop, and then when she finally found it, it t...

In the early chapters of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages , Guy Deutscher contrasts the difficul...

Last Friday was one of my strangest afternoons as a soccer coach: though the sun had been out for days, our field was still a mess-- there w...

Like all people, I am both intrigued and apprehensive about how others perceive me, and so-- during an office conversation on the interplay ...

Last week I was teaching my students the importance of beginning their college essay with an engaging opening, and I decided to illustrate t...