Not much of eighth grade social studies class made a lasting impression on me, but the teacher who taught me did. Her name was Mrs. Boswell, but the connection between that name and James Boswell, friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson, didn’t register with me until much later. Middle school, or junior high as it was called back then, arrived […]
This has been a banner week for clarifications or, to put it less delicately, bitch slaps. There was U. S. District Judge Linda Parker delivering a cheek-stinging slap to Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and a host of other pro-Trump lawyers for the suit they filed in Michigan accusing public officials of the illegal manipulation of ballots to get Joe Biden […]
“What I find sort of extraordinary is that this man is at the top of a very particular iceberg. I don’t think you can describe him as a ‘sex addict.’ He’s a predator. But what he’s, as it were, the top of the ladder of is a system of harassment and belittling and bullying and interference and what my mother […]
Life is so much more simple for me these days, now that my responsibilities are culled down to maintaining hearth and home, a selective social calendar, and a weekly missive in the form of this column. But even this relatively newfound simplicity is marked with complexities beyond my comprehension, which will be noted with an asterisk below. Take Monday for […]
One of the few things in American life that most of us have in common, regardless of whether one is a baby boomer or Generation Z or something in between, is a connection to The Wizard of Oz. Time hasn’t diminished the magic that occurs when Dorothy opens the door in a sepia-toned Kansas farmhouse and walks into the Technicolor […]
In one of my previous incarnations, about the time of the Nixon administration, there was an internal struggle between my desire to go to heaven and my wondering what the hell everyone would do once we got there. This seemingly is still a puzzlement to many, as googling “description of heaven” will return an almost endless list of opinions on […]
“Don’t be so critical” was an admonishment I heard so often growing up that, to this day, just hearing that C-word gives me flashbacks. It’s a trigger word for me, so it should come as no surprise that I’ve been going off like a revolver in a gunfight lately. The term “critical race theory” is really a string of triggers […]
Weeks with at least one good epiphany are the best. Even when we are young, those sudden discoveries about the meaning of something or what is essential about a situation or a person imbues us with the sense we’ve gotten at least a little bit closer to wisdom. It can be an intoxicating feeling. These days and at this age, […]
Democrats negotiating with Republicans (sort of) on the hot topics of voting rights and infrastructure is pretty clearly an exercise in futility, and a foreseeable one at that. We’ve been to this ball game before, and it’s increasingly clear that Chuck Schumer is no Mitch McConnell. Let’s put it in football terms, which is shaky ground for me but let’s […]
My deliberate avoidance of what passes as the latest in political news is proving to be a good deal easier than I thought it would be. I gather that there’s yet another email story circulating, this time about the former president’s assistant and chief of staff pressuring the Department of Justice to investigate claims of voter fraud in last year’s […]
