When I assigned “My Favorite Year” as a prompt for the writers in the memoir class I lead in downtown Chicago, Anu knew immediately which year she’d be writing about: 1969. That’s when she immigrated to America. Her husband Pawan sat in with our class for a few sessions last year, and it was easy […]

Next up in my series of writings featuring immigrants enrolled in my memoir classes: Mia Miller. For this installment, I’ll excerpt from one of her pieces. Mia was born in Egypt in the French speaking Jewish community of Cairo. Her family later moved to Paris, where she attended college and fell in love with Jonathan Miller, […]

The best thing on the radio in my view is an hour-long weekly program on NPR called On the Media, produced by WNYC, and hosted by journalism veterans Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. Full disclosure: I’m a journalism grad, a giant consumer of journalism, and I think about what makes good journalism more than the average […]