Ron Franscell's Blog

I originally wrote this essay as a newspaper column in 1995. It appears here today with a few minor but festive updates because, well, Scrooge is timeless. No businessman in […]

The post In defense of Ebenezer Scrooge appeared first on Ron Franscell.

“If you could be human for just one day,” I asked the robot inside ChatGPT, “what do you think you’d you be thankful for?” To be honest, I have a […]

The post If AI were human for a day, what would it be thankful for? appeared first on Ron Franscell.

It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he […]

The post Better Angels: No veteran should die alone appeared first on Ron Franscell.

This essay was originally written just two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012. Yesterday’s tragic shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis makes me want to re-run […]

The post We’ll always have mass murder appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Essayist Robert Fulghum once surmised that everything he ever needed to know he learned in kindergarten, but I was a slow learner. Yesterday, the 2025 Little League World Series got […]

The post Everything I need to know, I learned in Little League appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Fifty years. Half a century. And yet, if I close my eyes, I can still hear the music drifting down the hallways, feel the sun warming our faces on autumn […]

The post Class of ’75: Old friends, young again for one night appeared first on Ron Franscell.

A few years ago, I was contacted by the friend of a friend of a friend. He had a strange request: Could you help this French guy find the descendants […]

The post This boy died far away for a country that wasn’t his appeared first on Ron Franscell.

It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he […]

The post Better Angels: No veteran should die alone appeared first on Ron Franscell.

The potato patch behind Dermot Healy’s stone cottage wasn’t much bigger than a parking space, but the Irish winter had left it dog-eared and bedraggled. “The first thing,” Dermot said as […]

The post The day I planted Dermot Healy’s potatoes appeared first on Ron Franscell.

This was excerpted from Ron Franscell’s DELIVERED FROM EVIL, a book that explores the lives of 10 ordinary people who survived mass killers. One of those monsters was a racist […]

The post 52 years ago this week, a different terrorist unleashed himself on New Orleans appeared first on Ron Franscell.