On a just-completed cross-country trip, Carol and I drove, languidly and admiringly, through a tidy place full of cheery people, picture-postcard farms with bright-red barns, and white-fence towns with names like Oconomowoc and Ashwaubenon — Indian words that locals articulate as fluidly as they order a beer and a brat. That’s brat as in bratwurst […]
All posts by Dora Mekouar
Formidable Footpath
Posted August 27th, 2009 at 1:15 pm (UTC-4)
I want to tell you all about the Appalachian Trail from experience, for I have hiked it. Layers of fog greet A.T. hikers in the Appalachian Mountains. Well, not all 3,400 kilometers, or 2,100 miles, of it. More like 10 miles, some of it in my street shoes, thereby learning the first lesson of traversing […]
The Plain People
Posted August 13th, 2009 at 7:27 pm (UTC-4)
Carol and I recently visited the land of the Plain People in Holmes County, Ohio, just down the road from the ordinary, middle-sized cities of Akron and Canton. These neatly tied shocks of barley epitomize the look of the countryside in Ohio’s Amish country This is “Amish country,” the largest, if not richest, concentration of […]
Our Temple of Radio
Posted July 30th, 2009 at 6:53 pm (UTC-4)
Let’s say you’re a longtime, enthusiastic Voice of America listener who has the opportunity to visit the United States, and someone like me, right now, informs you that there’s one place in America where you can find: There’s even an interstate highway sign pointing drivers to an amazing VOA complex • the site where VOA […]
Noble Barns
Posted July 24th, 2009 at 3:58 pm (UTC-4)
Everywhere Carol and I go — well, maybe not everywhere — we look for old barns. Georgia farmers haul fertilizer to their barn — by horse wagon, you will note — in 1940 “Old barn” is nearly redundant, unfortunately, since just about every barn is old. As “Market to Market,” the online weekly journal of […]
The New Prometheus
Posted July 17th, 2009 at 4:31 pm (UTC-4)
Journalists are taught to “peg” our stories to something. We mustn’t just wade into a topic for no reason but should reference a breaking-news development to explain why in the world we’re writing a particular story. It would be perfectly OK to compose a “sidebar” about, say, marshmallows if a marshmallow factory has just exploded. […]
Cause Celebrity
Posted July 10th, 2009 at 1:28 pm (UTC-4)
What’s the difference between a prehistoric dinosaur and a journalist dinosaur? A prehistoric dinosaur didn’t know it was a dinosaur. The “bullpen” at the New York Times in September 1942, my birth month. For the benefit of our young readers, the instrument in the foreground is a “rotary” telephone, and those things spread across the […]
What’s in a (Nick)Name?
Posted July 2nd, 2009 at 1:06 pm (UTC-4)
The College of William & Mary, America’s second-oldest college (after Harvard), whose graduates include two U.S. presidents and 16 signers of the Declaration of Independence, is one of several academically superior schools of higher education in Virginia. But William & Mary, chartered in 1693 by Britain’s King William III and Queen Mary II, is also […]
IX at 37
Posted June 26th, 2009 at 1:10 pm (UTC-4)
“Time will show that this is the most important law in our culture over the last 40 years,” USA Today columnist Christine Brennan wrote recently. The most important? That must be some kind of law! Brennan is a sports columnist specifically, and like it or not — and there are plenty in both camps — […]
Hatred and Tranquility
Posted June 19th, 2009 at 7:39 pm (UTC-4)
A week or so ago, when I heard that an 88-year-old virulent white supremacist had shot and killed a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a few blocks away, my thoughts drifted to a serene spot — an almost eerily peaceful, contemplative patch of green — 2,200 kilometers (1,340 miles) away in […]
