General Posts

I started Knights Without Ceremony twenty-seven years ago, before the rising awareness of underrepresentation in the authorship and subject matter of books, especially those for kids. After a few flirtations with literary agents—and an offer of representation I declined—the manuscript went into the proverbial desk drawer for a couple of decades while my writing went…

The cover for my new book, Knights Without Ceremony: Insurrection, is not typical for upper middle grade medieval adventures—and for a very good reason. In the summer of 2024, I engaged ten middle school boys from my town of Winchester, Massachusetts, to provide feedback on an early draft of the book. But I also asked…

When told that some of the money he was getting from the Republican tax cuts was coming from Weather Service staffing cuts that can be directly linked to the deaths of over two dozen children at a Texas summer camp, Dan Framington, shopping for his second Maserati with the anticipated tax cut proceeds, said that…

Our firstborn will be receiving his high school diploma on the stage of Boston Symphony Hall today. The ceremony will mark the end of four years of study and fun, a time of growth and learning for him. But this joyous event also carries another significance: the end of our time with him and, to…

I crashed on my bike the other day. After almost forty years of daily riding, I’ve come to accept that crashes happen with mathematical regularity—this time on a gravel-covered corner in Carlisle. I survived with nothing broken, however, my bike was unridable. Since my wife—my usual rescue wagon—was conducting personal business, I requested an UberXL…

In my last post, I noted my concern with the risk of AI politicization, specifically around the intentional directing of chatbots to be biased, ideological, or to push misinformation. Yesterday, many news sources reported that xAI’s chatbot, Grok, had been programmed to spread misinformation about white genocide in South Africa. It turned out that someone…

AI offers the great potential to improve human lives, from problem-solving and efficiency gains to increased productivity. To date, I have not seen any sign that the political polarization that characterizes our society has affected AI. However, I believe it’s coming. On March 5, 2025, the Arizona Republic published an opinion piece by EJ Montini,…

The Department of Education under the Trump administration has declared that the thousands of book bans implemented in communities across the US over the past few years, a form of censorship that violates the First Amendment, are actually a “hoax.” This dismissal of reality, as though the book bans are somehow a years-long mass hallucination…

As a writer who is also a bullying prevention educator, I feel compelled to remind everyone that the notion that human gender falls on a spectrum is based on science. It’s a fact. In other words, it’s reality. The idea that gender is binary is not a fact. It’s not reality. It’s based on ideology…

I had dinner with a friend the other night, who told me that he ended his marriage. Well, technically, his marriage had been over for years, but he had reached the point where he could no longer continue living a lie. His wife was devastated, and his grown children were very upset. My friend feared…