What Immigrants Add to the Army
My father’s college roommate, after he returned home from the South Pacific in 1946, was another WWII veteran, a man named Mike Block. No, let me correct that: until he joined the US… Continue reading
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‘Unhand Me, Grey-Beard Loon!’
The power of language, of writing: “The Wedding-Guest stood still.” Every semester, I use this example with my writing students. “‘There was a ship,’ quoth” the mariner. And the Wedding-Guest listens to the… Continue reading
Trumpism = Fascism = Death
Aurel Kolnai’s 1938 book The War Against the West contains elements that leave me cold, most certainly, but also elements that bring on an immense chill far beyond mere cold. Among these are the… Continue reading
Black Lives Mattering
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn had gentrified over the 1980s and I took advantage, opening Shakespeare’s Sister, a café and gift store across from the Cobble Hill Cinema in 1994. The neighborhood, now less Italian… Continue reading
The Callowness of Assumed Guilt
The only lights in the room were a desk lamp pointed downward on the long table in front of my chair and an even smaller lamp over someone’s–I couldn’t see his face–notepad. I… Continue reading
Skip a Rope
When my father returned from service in the Pacific in January of 1946 (he had been gone for three years and had seen action on Leyte Island), he found that his mother had… Continue reading
Right Down to the Shoes
It was the shoes. Mine were giving me away. Everyone else at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary today was wearing, well, not leather. I had slipped into my Justin boots because I was going… Continue reading
Only Losers Wrap Themselves in Losers
How connected are you to the Confederacy? I ask this, particularly, of you who wave the battle flag and adore statues and images of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson. Do… Continue reading
Circular Journalism
I spent the summer of 1972 as a nightside copyboy in the third-floor newsroom of the New York Times on West 43rd Street. At the end of the summer, Sammy Solovitz, the legendary head copyboy… Continue reading
And You Fell for It, Didn’t You? I Mean You, Members of the Press
I’ve had the feeling, the last few days, of watching a Hollywood train wreck in slow motion but with the star believing he is driving the train and the director letting him think… Continue reading