A big hit in the summer of 1963 was Allan Sherman’s novelty song Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp). Here is the gist: It’s raining; Joe Spivey has developed poison ivy; Leonard Skinner got ptomaine poisoning after dinner; the counselors hate the waiters; the lake has alligators; the head coach wants no sissies—he’s quoting from Ulysses; they’re convening a search party for the missing Jeffery Hardy.

Worst of all, moans this most unhappy camper in his missive home, “I’ve been here one whole day.”

If Mom bakes a rectangular cake and Dad comes along and cuts a rectangular piece out of it willy-nilly—not from the corner or even necessarily parallel to the edges, which would be less annoying—how can Mom divvy up the remainder of the cake into the two promised equal amounts for her children? (Answers at the end of this column.)

Now for a completely different brainteaser: What do you get if you scratch the equality movement in America? Answer: envy.

I live in a neighborhood that seems to be the proselytism hub of Los Angeles. Let me describe why.

Recently, I was doing a quick run around my block when a woman jumped out of a corner, scaring me out of my skin. I skidded to such a sudden stop that my knee made a resentful “pop!” sound. The Hispanic-looking, guava-shaped woman, who had a long jet-black braid that swung near her hips, thrust a pamphlet at me and said, “Jesús te ama!” I refused the pamphlet, and though I smiled at her, frankly I was a little annoyed.

Life is full of semi-miracles: Let us rejoice and be glad.

If you’ve ever sat in a markup session where senators edit prospective federal laws, you’re not surprised that most legislation is messy sausage-making.

If you’ve ever visited a Hollywood set and seen how complicated the filmmaking process is, you’re not surprised that most movies flop.

Sometimes the work of a reporter feels like something akin to an iceberg. I don’t mean work that’s cold, isolated, and potentially destructive, though journalism apart from heart and humility can become just those things. 

In 2006 I wrote a column on forgiveness and why it’s the hardest thing we ever do, accounting for why we hardly do it.

Recent currents in American life have shifted my focus to that correlative activity to forgiving: apologizing. Apologizing is surely the runner-up for the most difficult of human activities, and I would venture this reason: Your problem in forgiving is my problem in apologizing.

I was at a homeless shelter in San Diego, trailing a gruff nonprofit CEO around, when I met Liz, a 24-year-old woman with ashy blond hair and a bright smile.

For more than seven months, Liz had been living in a tent in one of the roughest parts of town due to some mental health issues. Liz may have been sleeping on the concrete pavement and gotten her cell phone, handbags, and clothes stolen, but it seemed nobody had been able to steal her confidence in her God-given beauty.

“You want to see something beautiful?” she asked.