My brother Ben, the youngest Lester brother (#5) and so always the baby, though he’s in his early twenties, started a blog a few months ago to practice essay writing for his medical school entrance exams, which he plans to take in a few years. It’s a cool project. He gives himself a strict half hour on each essay–from looking at the prompt to completion–and posts the result, whatever it is. I haven’t posted anything about it because he’s been writing  just for practice, not public consumption, and probably would be angry with me for directing traffic his way. But his latest post he calls “My First Real Blog,” a nice ranty rant about media spin and health care reform. He’s a paramedic (which he doesn’t say in the post) so he gets an inside view. He’s funny, sarcastic, and cynical (for a while his Myspace headline was “Saving the world, one abdominal pain at a time”) and it’s nice to read him being passionate.

The Fifth One