We are moving to a smaller house and I’m deciding what not to bring. A drawer in a file cabinet contains leaflets and newspapers from the Vietnam War era. These are destined for a library…
Posts published in “Essays”
My first visit as a would be worshipper to a synagogue in about 75 years took place last Saturday. The visit was inspired by a pervasive feeling that I wanted to pray. But I cannot…
We’d flown into a Mexican coastal resort without hotel reservations. On the wretched stretch of road between airport and town, we chatted up our cab driver — gushing over family photos pasted across his dashboard…
Fall is always the best time to meander around the country. Across the Midwest the corn is being harvested. The browns and golds of stubble and still-standing stalks warm those vast flat or slightly undulating…
By the time I knew enough to know where I was but not how I got there, I was four years old and living in Cleveland, Ohio. I probably shrugged at the news. You will…
One thing the American public schools used to teach—or tried to—was the memorization of dates. At the top of that list were 1620, 1776, 1861, 1945. One of my favorite bathroom books remains the Timetables of…
The New York Times science writer Gina Kolata is the older sister of Judi Bari, but that’s not the item, as Mr. Caen used to say. Kolata is a serious weight lifter. Perhaps due to…
For a world-famous city, San Francisco has a surprisingly small coterie of so-called “celebrities” (a celebrity being, I would say, someone who is widely known outside his own community and his own field of endeavor).…
John Howard Griffin—a most extraordinary fellow, a one-man-band of virtue and a virtuoso, who was, quite literally among other things, and at all of these first rate—a novelist, essayist, musicologist, theologian, expert in animal husbandry,…