Mort Maimon

As the spouse of a former university president, I like to think I know my way around a college quad. This week in Inside Higher Ed, I...

If you want to get a good laugh from my family, use my name and “optimist” in the same sentence. You know what? I don’t consider that to...

So much to read, so little time to go through those pages. That’s why I now scan the periodicals I get and decide which articles to read...

Like most people, I take many things in life for granted, particularly everyday items whose reliable functioning I’d rather be complacent...

I’m going to be honest here, which, of course, rules out my serving as defense attorney for our most recent ex-President. So be it. I’m...

Some words we toss around are substitutes for more precise vocabulary that could express our thoughts with greater accuracy. But without...

Karl Marx had it wrong. Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses; sports is. Let’s define our terms here. Opiates reputedly are mind...

A few days before “it” was to take place, the prospect of participating began to worry me. When it was still in the fairly distant...

While driving, I’ll sometimes be idling behind a car with a “26.2” sticker on its rear bumper. The sticker signifies that someone with...

Rosie and Della, two of our granddaughters, individually fixate on a single word that provides a clue to her personality. Rosie, the...

Mort's birthday poem for Elaine You’ve had many successes in trying to improve education To get it in a productive groove. And,...

A few nights ago, Elaine and I, along with two friends, drove to a restaurant in the heart of South Philly, an area filled with exotic...

Because of respect for confidentiality, I won’t reveal my source for the following information. I was going to cite respect for...

Two years ago, checking out condos before returning to live in Philadelphia, we became especially interested in one having many features...

I won’t define my sense of what hypocrisy is here, but I’ll end the piece with a prime example of it. The road to that unseemly quality...

A few months ago, when somebody introduced me to the word game called Wordle, I embraced it the way many Republicans fall head over heels...

Among its features, Philadelphia has cultivated awareness of nature by naming major streets “Chestnut,” “Walnut,” “Spruce,” and “Pine.”...

Sports jackets are meant to be worn, not exiled permanently to the bleak interior of an unexplored closet. In those more social,...

In stressful times, we tend to recall fondly the “old days.” Those reminiscences are meant to contrast placid then with troubled now....

For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to invent distractions to spice up some of the boring, repetitive activities of life. Usually,...