"Here's to the three birds! May you always have a bird on the table, a bird in your glass and an eagle in your pocket."

I first heard that toast when I was very young from an elderly neighbor. It was a toast from her childhood in the early 1920s. The toast her mother and uncles always used. Already something of an antique in Jazz Age America.…

Today the iconic claddagh ring is, along with the harp and shamrock, one of the most widely recognized and most iconically “Irish” symbols in America. The commercial value of the claddagh ring design is enormous -- and probably impossible to…

A war movie, particularly a war movie that is the true story of a real group of men and women, is hard to make and hard to watch. Anything short of the truth is disrespectful, but the truth is hard to define, hard to acknowledge, hard to understand.…