While reading Peter Roderick’s account of the dismantling of Britain’s National Health Service in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, I put…
Posts published in “Essays”
Last night Marcia and I watched Seymour: An Introduction, a documentary about the pianist and piano teacher Seymour Bernstein, who was eighty-five at the time the film was made and is eighty-eight today. The film, directed by Ethan Hawke, the actor, is certainly about classical music and pianos and playing the piano, but the movie is also a fascinating and ever-surprising portrait of an extremely thoughtful person with an extraordinary talent for teaching.
We've all suffered to some degree, have we not? We all have our share of pain and misery and loss in our stories, some to…
One of the men who helped make Jim Jones and The People’s Temple a powerhouse in the 1970s and then turned against him just before…
There's an old sad saying that "marijuana does cause insanity - but only in politicians." Alas, the same holds true for guns. President Obama, spurred…
All my life I've known about Spain. I grew up singing Freiheit and Viva la Quince Brigada and Los Cuatro Generales, and knew the names…
Ralph Cantor is 71 years young born in the Bronx New York with no silver spoon upbringing. When he was a young boy and very…
When I was six, having arrived mid-year in Mrs. Bushnell’s First Grade class at Las Lomitas Elementary, I won my first friends by telling them stories at recess, stories I made up. And there came a day when Mrs. Bushnell was desperate for a nap and asked us to put our heads down and nap with her, but Donny Dorset protested, “We’re not tired, Mrs. Bushnell. Couldn’t Todd tell us a story?”
Three hippies linger in the former dining room of the Farmhouse, lounged on sectional sofas and recovering from the first annual "Rakefest" Friday night. It's…