Opinion

I'm a college admissions officer, and I'm as eager as everyone else to see the end of the covid-19 pandemic. The coronavirus has thrown campus life into chaos, and the college experience for many students has been bleak. And yet, for people in my line of work, the pandemic has come with one silver lining: the near decimation of the SAT and ACT.

Friends of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch spent recent days in high dudgeon (is there another kind of dudgeon?) over the wording of an NPR report concerning the jurist's masklessness. I found this highly amusing - self-righteous Washington hypocrisy can be funny - due to my personal experience on the receiving end of Gorsuch's own journalism. As I will explain, he is not a man who believes in correcting mistakes.

When you can’t see where you are going, don’t keep going. And, if you hear the sound of the rumble strips at the side of the roadway, it’s time to stop.

In the fall of 2002, I slipped on the ice when I was leaving work one night and twisted my hip. The pain never fully went away, but I imagined it was just a pulled muscle or torn cartilage. I was 37 years old and healthy. What else would it be? An MRI later showed a tumor on my hip that turned out to be the presenting symptom of multiple myeloma, a rare bone-marrow cancer. At the time, the average life expectancy for people newly diagnosed with the condition was a year and a half.