July 5th, 2017 | Friends, General, Politics, social media, Society at Large
As I write this, Donald John Trump has been President of the United States for 161 days—not quite 24 weeks. He has been, as he tweets it, “modern-day presidential.” I can’t even begin to parse that; obviously such presidential qualities as dignity, humanity and...
July 2nd, 2017 | Education, General, literature and poetry, Memory, Politics, Society at Large
In the course of making some point or other, I asked the high-school age students in my summer workshop what their favorite books were. Any book, I said, it could even be a picture book you read with your parents. Not one of the eight mentioned a book. Finally, a lad...
May 31st, 2017 | Architecture and Design, Europe, General, Society at Large, Time Passes, Travel
“Alistair Horne, Vivid War Historian and Onetime British Spy, Dies at 91.” The headline in today’s New York Times would have caught my eye any morning. Right now, however, I am up to page 306 of Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris, engrossed in his narrative of the years...
May 13th, 2017 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Europe, General, Popular Culture, Shopping, Society at Large, Travel
Apparently, our neighborhood does not exist. Consult a tourist guide like Eyewitness Paris and there is an empty white space where one might expect to find Batignolles. The teal-green blob of Montmartre floats in a void separate from the colors that identify the...
November 9th, 2016 | General, Politics, Popular Culture, social media, Society at Large
When I went to bed, North Carolina had already fallen and I knew the nightmare was about to descend. When I awoke, I watched the numbers on my clock flip toward 6:15 when the radio would click on with the news on WYPR. And it did. And three or four words in, I heard...
March 7th, 2016 | Education, General, Memory, Politics, Popular Culture, Society at Large, Women
It was August 13, 2015, exactly six months and twenty-one days ago as I write this, that I published my anxiety about the campaign of Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination for President of the United States of America. I was told not to worry, that he was a...