Dear Dad,

OK, you are going to be alone with your daughters. Without your fantastic wife, their mother, for nine days.

Nine days.

Nine days alone with the 5- and 7-year-old, while Mom performs her fantastic one-woman show, "Double Happiness: A Tale of Love, Loss and One...

I haven't watched any videos of the chaos at the Boston Marathon.

No, I don't live in a cave, nor am I a video-hating Luddite. No matter how often I click on the links, the videos never play. My cellphone experiences some sort of quirk that refuses to load...

Valerie Harper received a death sentence. Just like my father.

And while I hope that she lives as long as she can, comfortably and with dignity, "surviving" these types of cancer does not always mean what we would like it to. We may treasure the image of the celebrity medical...

My name is Davis Schneiderman, and I am a screen addict.

I can't stop interacting with screens. I'm using one now, of course, to write this post -- a moment of necessary productivity -- yet I am tethered to an array of devices in an almost constant cycle of euphoric...

This open letter to you, Kelly, is a deliberately non-Hallmark message.

Why this blog post and not a traditional card, you ask?

Well, first off: It's the 21st century. What benefit do we really derive from buying pre-packaged cards and then letting them collect in piles around our...

I admit it. I was a Boy Scout.

Not only was I a Boy Scout who achieved the middling rank of First Class Scout, but I also passed through the entire run of Cub Scout ranks. I recall, proudly, at 11 or so, crossing some sort of bridge (not symbolic:...

When faced with unlimited choice, do we choose what we know?

I've been experiencing this mild dilemma in miniature with my membership to Spotify Premium. Yes, I've been enticed by the promised of the celestial jukebox, and increasingly chagrined to consider my boxes of old CDs sitting idle in...

And then my knee popped.

It was Christmas dinner at my sister-in-law's. Although I told a pharmacist soon after that I was fighting off a gang of white supremacists, I merely stood up from the couch, spritely as ever, only to feel my weight shift along with a clicking sensation...

I was happy to be interviewed recently for a future edition of the "Possible Architect" literary podcast, when the conversation turned toward the speed by which I (and the host, Trevor Dodge) listen to audiobooks. We double and triple the speed of the narration so as to cram...

While a large segment of pundits, wonks, and beltway insiders stand ready to put the final nails in the coffin of the Mitt Romney campaign for president of the United States (The epitaph: "He would have been supremely mediocre!"), the three upcoming presidential debates may be "Miracle Mitt's" best chance...

One recent evening, my wife Kelly splashed down the stairs, her arms overflowing with old photo albums.

I watched her pull photos from the albums into a not-insignificant pile on the wooden floor. She's a DJ pulling beats away from a well-woven track, a scrapbooker loosening accumulated...

A few weeks ago, I offered tips for how to spend your last summer before college, as a complement to some earlier counterintuitive tips. Now as this first-summer-before-it-all-begins has all but dissolved in a mix of mosquito bites, drive-in movies, and milkshakes, congrats: you've been going...

Let's face it, Twitter causes trouble.

Everyone from Anthony Weiner to Kenneth Cole to Ashton Kutcher to Sarah Palin and a thousand other celebrities and public figures have learned that the absurd ease of micro-blogging doesn't always translate into a public relations win.

Even if an errant-tweet is...

The Freeh report on the Pennsylvania State University charges a failure of leadership of Penn State's administration, and seemingly confirms the Board of Trustee's decision to oust former president Graham Spanier in November 2011. Unsurprisingly, Spanier's attorneys have countered that "Mr. Freeh unfairly offered up Dr....

Once, an incoming freshman asked me this question, "Should I bring my own pillow?"

I've also spent much of the last two weeks on the phone -- or on Skype -- with a set of incoming first-year college students armed with an array of questions both profoundly intellectual and suitably...

Crouching by the Seine, I recognized the patent absurdity of it all.

And this feeling of almost farcical joy amplified and buzzed as I played with the gang of schoolchildren on the bridge over the river. I drew them close to me as I froze or moved slowly in...

Ok, I confess: I've been Zuckered.

I woke earlier than usual on Friday, May 18th, and in a bleary-eyed stupor made a drudge to the laptop. With a few clicks -- perhaps all too easily -- I purchased shares of Facebook.

I'm no mogul. My stock portfolio is...

Even Anna Jarvis lamented the "Hallmark Holiday" that had taken over her grand idea.

Jarvis, the founder of the carnation-and-card-soaked occasion for gifting otherwise known as Mother's Day, spent her later years railing against the commercialization of "the second Sunday in May" (a phrase she trademarked in the early 1900s).

I began to suspect that watching Return Of The Jedi with my daughters was a bad idea when my youngest daughter, Kallista, 4, answered a question from Athena, 6, as to whether we would ever see Jabba the Hut again:

"No, Athena, Princess Leia didn't want to be a slave...

In their defense, I was a miserable baby.

You see, I cried. Not merely when I was hungry or tired or soiled or generally displeased about the inaccessibility of my favorite small toy animal, a wide-eyed tiger. No, I had colic: intense and frequent crying, nay screaming, doubled down with...