I wish all my several readers much happiness in 2023 and at the same time beg forgiveness for my behavior at the AVA’s annual New Year’s Eve Party. My actions was inexcusable, although none (or…
Posts published in “Essays”
So we all take a day off, on the off chance we have a job to take off from, to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday and ponder the meaning of his life. The in-school discussion,…
After clubs and concert halls shut down in March of 2020, the enterprising and exuberant pianist Emmet Cohen invited the cameras and microphones into his Harlem apartment for weekly Monday night jam sessions that brought—and…
Woke this morning, Tuesday, January 3, 2023 and clicked on an email from the SF Chronicle, a daily paper that’s a shadow of its former self, that said a “brutal storm” was headed for the…
In 2021 an oddly named drug company headquartered in Ireland, Jazz, acquired GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company whose main asset was Epidiolex a cannabis-based medication that in November, 2013 had been designated an "orphan-drug" by…
I have a friend in his mid-seventies who still drinks two or more big drinks every night and I thought I would offer him an opportunity to dry out. I called him yesterday in the…
What I consider the most cynical utterance in the entire literature of Americana — H.L. Mencken's "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" -- presents a point of view I…
Seldom in European history has an invading power so exaggerated its own strength, and underestimated that of its enemy to the degree that Russia did when it attacked Ukraine on 24 February. Ten months after…