Last night, I had two different sets of anxiety dreams. These days, you don’t even have to be asleep to have anxiety dreams. Between COVID-19, a critical mass of people finally starting to think about what it really means to come to terms with the US’s legacy of institutionalized racism, despite very real pushback from … Continue reading Art for an anxious moment: remembering a childhood ‘friend’
Category: kindness
What a couple of weeks it’s been. Fifty people, including members of the Macy-Huffman and Mossimo-Loughlin families were charged with screwing deserving college applicants out of admission to schools where they may have thrived. It would have been the talk of Sunday shows in the US, but for the white male horror show at a … Continue reading Neighborhood readers talk books, eat cake: ‘Resistance Women’ Part II
It’s been one of those weeks where there’s much to write about that it’s hard to know where to start. Sometimes when it's all too much, you want to curl up and take a nice nap. Michael Cohen paid a visit to Congress and refused to promise not to profit from a book or movie … Continue reading If Willy Wonka’s factory churned out Mind Candy: a Dispatch from the Department of Healing Truths
I first heard of Josephine Baker in the 1980s, when my sister wrote a story about her in the New Haven Courier Register. Debby was a feature writer there, and her story mostly focused on the 12 children Baker had adopted from countries around the world. Josephine Baker and 10 of her 12 children on … Continue reading ‘Josephine Baker’s Last Dance’ tells an important story at the right moment
Update (January 24): I wrote this post on January 20th shortly after the first two videos were released. Rereading the post after all the other information occurred, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much I'd gotten right. I'm leaving the post as is and adding a couple of thoughts: The teen I named "Smirkboy" … Continue reading Covington students latest link in long, depressing chain: a post with images & an update
Remember when you were a little kid and your parents told you not to be a sore loser? What? Your parents never told you that? Or they did, and you blew them off? Well, hello there, Robin Vos, Joel Kleefisch, Alberta Darling, Scott Fitzgerald and all but three of your Republican colleagues in the Wisconsin legislature. … Continue reading Sore losers in need of history lesson: an open letter to the Wisconsin legislature
Five years ago, my pal Molly and her husband Richard flew in from New York to visit her parents, "Mel" (z"l) and "Sally." It was their first visit after M&S moved into "Old People Harvard," the independent and assisted-living community where Mom had been living for two years. It was a great gift to Mom … Continue reading Accidental landlording & purposeful librarianship: a dispatch from the busy zone with a reminder to VOTE TUESDAY!
Dear Dr. Ford: I watched some of your testimony last week and want you to know that I thought you were amazing. You made sense out of something that was hard to make sense of, and you did it with elegance and good humor and decency. It was easy to imagine you as … Continue reading Thank you from the bottom of my heart: an open letter to Dr. Susan Blasey Ford
Mom died on February 25th. Her funeral was in Utica, New York; yesterday was her memorial service. This is the eulogy I wrote and read yesterday. Eulogy II The first Tuesday after Mom’s funeral, I woke up and, because it has been part of my waking-up ritual for what seems like forever (even though it … Continue reading Death: the most unlikely of happy endings or ‘Bossiest Eulogy Ever’
“It is coercion of the strongest kind, because it appears in the guise of a self-evident necessity and is thus not even recognized as a coercive force.” Ludwik Fleck, “Genesis & Development of a Scientific Fact” I started 2017 with a post about making this a “no bullshit” year. Seing it out with a … Continue reading ‘No Bullshit’ 2017 is almost over: Time to ring in #racistinrecovery 2018
the sentence factory 