King George III sat moodily at his breakfast in Kew Castle while awaiting his prime minister, Lord Frederick North. On this morning the king had little appetite for his favorite morning dishes heaped atop the…
Posts published in “Essays”
All of you who’ve been complaining about the heat and the hot weather and the sweat and the high temperatures and how hard it is to fall asleep when temperatures are not even in the…
By the summer of 1980 the China of Mao Zedong's Communist Party was the result of 30 years of applied radical ideology. Every aspect of life had been relentlessly re-thought and restructured to conform to…
Travel broadens one’s horizons (it also shrinks one’s wallet, but that is a discussion for another day). During the pandemic years, my travel was limited to car trips. However, broad acceptance of the Covid vaccine…
The National Association of Piano Dealers reported 364,545 sales of new instruments in the United States in 1909. That was four times the number of automobiles manufactured in the country that same year. This output…
“I am not now, nor have I ever been…” If you grew up in the 1950s, as I did in a lefty American family, the name Joseph McCarthy elicited as much loathing as that of…
My condo building is peopled for the most part by liberal Baby Boomers interested in the world around them, and on a recent balmy afternoon a group of us sat chatting as neighbors do at…