I’ll be back on January 5th. Later that night, Emily returned home, warmed her hands around a cup of tea, and set the original lantern on her windowsill—lit, as it had been meant to be. She unfolded the letter once more. Outside, snow drifted across the quiet street. Then she saw one lantern glow. Then another, and another, until the...

Emily returned to the attic the next evening. The attic felt different, not mysterious, purposeful. She unlocked the small door again and stood for a moment, looking at the shelves lined with lanterns. She counted at least twenty-four before she stopped. They had not been forgotten. They had been prepared. One by one, she carried the lanterns down carefully, setting...

In the winter of his century, Charles Dickens walked a London powered by industry but running short on warmth. People moved past one another as if connection were a luxury they could no longer afford. Wealth and want lived on opposite sides of the same street, and compassion, even at Christmas time, was showing signs of strain. Dickens wrote his...

I have stopped watching national news about Donald Trump because the coverage now mirrors the damage itself. What once informed now exhausts; what once clarified now amplifies. The daily cycle no longer explains what is happening to the country—it re-enacts it. His indecent words following the death of beloved filmmaker Rob Reiner were the last straw. They recalled Joseph N....

A national media organization has recognized the seriousness of our political division and offered something we’ve been missing… A REAL beginning toward ending the death spiral the country has been living in. With the launch of NBC’s initiative, “Finding Common Ground,” the organization is making a deliberate investment in something we’ve been losing: civic dialogue grounded in respect, clarity, and...

Every December, I look forward to reading and watching Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. While there are countless versions of the classic, I always return to the film with Reginald Owen as Scrooge, not only because Owen embodies the part, but also because it features Gene Lockhart as Bob Cratchit. A brilliant character actor with a gift for sincerity, Lockhart brings...

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1838 Voltaire once said, “Common sense is not so common.” Nearly three centuries later, that...

CONTEMPT—Raw, in-your-face, unapologetic, and morally bankrupt. Every so often, the country reaches a point where character is not an abstraction but a requirement. We’re in one of those moments now. The country’s cynicism level has reached DEFCON 1. You can feel it in the way the culture has shifted. You can see it in how some treat once-trusted institutions with...

I recently read about a group of explorers who located a ship deep beneath the dark, cold waters off Antarctica: a vessel whose very name says a great deal about the man who once led her. Ernest Shackleton’s greatness didn’t come from a great feat. It came from the humility to set aside his own ambition the moment his men...

Wisconsin’s night sky opened to a rare sight, one usually reserved for places far colder and farther north—the Northern Lights. The colors pulled against each other, as if the sky itself were wrestling with something unsettled. Striking, but what held me wasn’t the sky; it was everything beneath it: a farmhouse, some outbuildings, a scatter of lights. Chaos above; calm...