Cruise ships are little countries unto themselves. They have their own socioeconomic pecking order and they abide by their own tax code and their own laws (or lack thereof in most cases). If Americans suffer some grievance aboard, there are three bodies they can solicit for help: the FBI, the...

I was an only child for 33 years, until five months ago when my father adopted Griffin. He goes to a posh daycare and eats home-cooked meals every night. He drinks filtered water and wears expensive little sweaters. His baby picture was published in a national magazine.

My little brother...

Yesterday, our President replaced his top general in a war we can't seem to win,
thousands of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, and housing sales and the stock market continued to slump. Yesterday was a rough day in the life of America, but it was also...

The Gulf has always been good to me. I come from a Gulf State, and grew up eating its oysters and shrimp, its Blue Crab and Red Snapper. I fished in it, swam in it, and nearly learned how to surf in it. But I also lived in a house...

My mother flew 2,000 miles to be at my father's gay wedding. Twenty years ago she was just "his poor wife" to the gossips in our Louisiana hometown, and I was "their poor son." We lost a lot when my father came out of the closet: a business, a home,...

My grandmother made the best lemon meringue pie you ever had. And when she cracked her eggs, she'd always dip her finger in the shells to get out every last drop of white. She was a child of The Depression, her mother died giving birth to her ninth child and...

Facebook: where we spy on our ex, stay in touch with that fling in Europe, judge our friends' inane hourly updates, and get hounded by our high school classmates. But where we keep up with mom, it most certainly is not--or at least not until now.

A friend of...

Go to any bar in any major city on a busy night, look around, and you'll see more hands on PDA's and cell phones than you'll see on cocktails.

It used to be that if you tried to talk to someone, you only had to compete with the other...