I spent much of the first half of 1998 thinking about dying. Not my dying, necessarily, although those thoughts were almost inevitable. I spent several months reporting a magazine story about a brilliant, accomplished student at my alma mater — the University of Virginia — who had inexplicably committed suicide. …

The federal coronavirus response reminds me of my father after his stroke, when he’d say things that were simply incompatible with reality — In January of 2012, my healthy and spry 82-year-old father suffered a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke. Though he would somehow miraculously survive and regain consciousness, the resulting brain damage left him radically altered both physically and mentally. …

Around the turn of the 20th century, a young Italian immigrant named Enrico “Henry” Caputo arrived to work in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. In 1906 he married another Italian immigrant, Anna Fuoco, the 14-year-old daughter of a janitor. …

Every year on Yom HaShoah, I pause and remember the many members of my family murdered during the Holocaust. Sadly, each year, as I do more research, the list of names grows longer. For more background on my family’s Holocaust experience, see this post. In Memorium: Shmiel Jäger 1895–1943 Ester…

The star of ‘Tiger King’ has a fascinating tie to America’s frontier past — If you need any additional proof that the world is completely upside down right now, look no further than Netflix, where the most-watched show for two weeks running revolves around a flamboyant, tattoo-covered, mullet-sporting 56-year-old inmate at the Grady, Oklahoma County Jail who gained notoriety as an exotic animal zookeeper…

Stop the USCIS from holding your family’s records hostage. On November 14, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) entered a notice of proposed fee hikes into the Federal Register. The revised fee schedules, which cover a wide range of services to immigrants, are alarming across the board for…

As the new public face of the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies, acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli has wasted no time stirring up collective ire. Most notably, he set off a firestorm of criticism by rewriting the iconic Emma Lazarus poem that has long functioned as a kind of unofficial…

Notorious former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, currently running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has made no bones about how he feels about illegal immigrants. Let’s say he is a bit — how shall we say? — hard core. But what of Arpaio’s own immigrant roots? Born in Massachusetts…

There’s been nothing short of an explosion in consumer DNA testing of late. How do you decide which test to take and with which company? I’m going to assess the various options with an eye towards Jewish testers, who have to factor in the complications associated with endogamy. But many…