Some of you may have seen this strange headline in the Boston Globe last week: "BC celebrates its decline in applications." Huh? Why would any school ever want fewer applicants?

Turns out that in the search for that perfect freshman class, quantity does not equal quality.

Remember school fire drills? The bleating of the alarm, the orderly line up, the thrill of unscheduled playtime in the schoolyard? Drama was shivering next to the jungle gym because the teachers made us evacuate the building without stopping to grab our coats.

Then came

I should have known better. After all, I'm the middle-aged, one-of-these-days empty nester who put out a want ad for a nanny to help me with my technology. But like a toddler with no impulse control, I keep waddling toward the socket with my curious, sticky fingers. It's...

Last fall I asked my College Writing students to digitally disconnect for 24 hours. That's right: no Internet equals no texting, no tweeting, no Facebooking, no skyping, no web-surfing, not even good old-fashioned emailing.

I'm thinking I might recycle that assignment this September, since clearly the issue...

I spent last Saturday morning at a tattoo parlor with my teenage daughter. But don't worry; we weren't there for a tattoo. (I do have some standards.) We were there to pay someone to shove a 16-gauge needle through the cartilage of her ear.

A month before this day, my...

On Halloween in 2010, Tiffany Clark allowed her 16-year-old daughter to have some friends over. By midnight, the gathering had turned into an out-of-control party. The police were called, one girl was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and the next morning Tiffany Clark was summonsed to court.

Earlier this week,...

Last Friday, five months after receiving approval from the FDA, pharmacists finally began doling out the newest sleep aid to the groggy hordes.

Zopidem Tartrate will be sold under the brand name Intermezzo. Say what you will about big pharma, but they sure know how to name...

I'm horrified by this. Not because I'm in any way anti-Muslim, but because I am in all ways anti-ignorance. I know, I know, it's happening everywhere, but I never thought it would happen in my family. I thought we were safe. I thought we took all the precautions:

We don't...

Seeking live-in babysitter for technologically handicapped middle-aged adult. "Mom," as she's known, is generally easy-going and well-behaved, but must be monitored with vigilance around all digital devices. The ideal candidate will demonstrate infinite patience along with basic, elementary school knowledge of technology ranging from the television remote to the iPhone.

We lie on our backs in shavasana, the corpse pose. According to the yogis, this pose mimics the death of our practice, the end of the struggle, and it is a necessary and restorative step before we'll roll onto our right side in the fetal position to symbolize our rebirth....