[NOTE: I missed the anniversary yesterday, but today I’m recycling this previous post on the subject.] Once again it’s the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki followed three days later, and Japan surrendered on August … Continue reading →
Remember ten years ago when Boko Haram kidnapped many girls from a school in Nigeria? It was disturbing front-page news everywhere. Michelle Obama got into the act with a “Bring back our girls” campaign online. Well, a couple of days … Continue reading →
A nightmare is different than an anxiety dream, although the latter is bad enough. But whereas an anxiety dream makes a person feel uneasy, a nightmare transports the dreamer into a world of pure evil in which the sleeper feels … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Here’s a repeat of one of my earliest posts, written in my very first year of blogging: May, 2005. Back then I didn’t have all that many readers, so I thought I’d bring it out for another go-round.] I … Continue reading →
It’s a daily voice, like a friend you talk to on the phone every day. The closest thing to this kind of writing prior to blogging was the daily columnist (when did those go out? or did they ever exist?). … Continue reading →
My ex-husband saves things. A lot of things. But mostly paper. Old magazines, old newspapers, old medical records, every piece of artwork our son ever created, and old letters. Recently he’s been going through the stacks and trying to weed … Continue reading →
Recently a friend of mine mentioned that her book group had been reading the 1975 Anne Tyler novel Searching For Caleb, and after she’d read the copy that she’d found in her bookshelf, she noticed that my name was written … Continue reading →
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Unfortunately, it seems as though it’s always a timely subject, and right now even more timely. So I thought it could use another go-round, very slightly edited.] Commenter “Ymarsakar” once made … Continue reading →
—John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s … Continue reading →
This quote from Nicole Kidman about her marriage to Tom Cruise caught my eye at Yahoo: Nicole Kidman on Marrying Tom Cruise at Age 23: ”˜I Look Back Now and I’m Like, “What?”’ I thought the article was going to … Continue reading →
Recently something reminded me of a book I had first read back in the 1980s, one I would recommend to everyone. It’s called Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, and it’s quite different from most Holocaust literature: An important work of … Continue reading →
There’s a trend I’ve noticed in the comments section here and also in some of the emails I’ve been getting: quite a few people admonishing me that I should shut up like a good apparatchik and take one for the … Continue reading →