Dear Billie Joe,

First of all, congratulations to you and Mike and Tre on the sixth anniversary of the release of American Idiot -- for my tastes the seminal rock album of the past decade. Of course, congratulations are also in order for all the kudos you...

Two weeks ago, under a practically full moon, I stood on a beach directly adjacent to Kennedy Space Center, my feet wet in the glass-flat surf, watching 148 sea turtle hatchlings, each one about the size of a walnut, and all of them translocated from their original nests on the...

As an eighth grader in Parma, Ohio, I sometimes cut the entire day of school, rode the bus downtown, where I transferred to another bus that I rode to University Circle, where I transferred to yet another bus that I rode up Murray Hill on the East Side of Cleveland,...

There's an ad in the new New Yorker featuring the airbrushed photos of the Fab Four -- not the Beatles, of course, but Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda from Sex and the City 2 -- or as I like to call them, the Four Clothes Horses of the Apocalypse. The...