ArcaMax

When the stockings are hung by the chimney with care, lies about St. Nicholas soon will be there.

For though the Yuletide means a great many things to a great many people, to me, it mostly means preparing myself to deceive.

It's the season of giving for some, but, for me, it's the season of lying.

In every other aspect of my parenting, I try ...Read more

I love Thanksgiving and its traditions -- the homemade centerpieces, the bad football, the interminable televised parades -- but there's one I'd rather skip.

It's an almost-inescapable tradition, one that usually rears its head just as you're sitting down to eat. Everyone's starving because the turkey took forever to cook, and plates loaded ...Read more

I learned this week that first-grade math is too hard, my joints are falling apart and fake eyelashes are a demonic creation.

First, my son came home with a word problem. We sat down at the kitchen table to read:

"If there are twice as many blue balloons as red balloons and two more yellow balloons than green balloons, why is Elon Musk ...Read more

I dreamed last night that I watched bombs explode outside my house, missiles dropped from planes flying high in the sky.

As the bombs landed, pieces of debris flew toward me. It occurred to me that I knew who had attacked us: It was not a foreign enemy, but fellow Americans who had bombed our neighborhood.

"The bombs are from another state, a ...Read more

There's power in a "no."

Just ask the Greeks, who celebrate the word every year, on Oxi Day, Oct. 28.

It's a day created in honor of the Greeks' most famous "no," the one given to Benito Mussolini's ambassador after he ordered Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas to let the Italian army occupy Greece.

"No!" Metaxas allegedly responded. (His ...Read more

Like Hilary Swank, you, too, can have your first baby at 48 years old. I just hope you don't bank on it.

After Swank recently announced she was expecting twins, the website Jezebel posted about celebrities who had babies later in life. I worked my way through the article, shocked, as the writer confidently proclaimed Swank's parenthood was ...Read more

If someone deserves to die, should we kill them?

That's what I asked myself recently, as I read the news that the jurors recommended life in prison instead of the death penalty for Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school killer.

His crimes were unquestionably heinous. He murdered more than a dozen children and teachers and permanently traumatized ...Read more

It has come to my attention that I am not universally beloved.

I know, I know. Weird, right?

But, like every person who has ever publicly expressed an opinion, I have gotten hate mail.

I imagine my professional ancestor, a Neanderthal inscribing tablets with his opinions on the stone-tipped arrow shortage, and I bet he got a few rocks lobbed ...Read more

Autumn, like all good art, is about death.

That's what I found myself thinking as I read the comments on Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Tha Crossroads" video on YouTube.

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is a rap group from the 1990s, though I'm mostly familiar with their oeuvre based on what I could pick up through the walls separating my teenage room from that ...Read more

The pandemic is over.

How do I know?

Not because COVID has gone away -- no, I realize that many are still getting sick and even dying from the virus -- and not because we no longer mask up or get booster shots (in fact, I just wore a mask at the doctor's office today and am scheduling family boosters for next month).

No, I know the pandemic ...Read more

Blessed art the millionaires, for a million dollars does not goeth as far as it used to.

Blessed art the governors of Florida and Texas, for they owneth the libs in the most Christlike way possible when they droppeth off desperate migrants, starving and exhausted, in blue cities for publicity stunts, treating human beings as props in political ...Read more

The following is a wholly fabricated, fictitious conversation between a college professor and his students on Sept. 8, 2022, shortly after the Royal Family announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

TEACHER: Class, I have bad news for you all. We've just learned that someone tremendously influential has died.

STUDENT A: Oh, no! From ...Read more