Driving home from a coffee date with a friend, about which more later, I listened to a report on NPR about landline phones. Where would we be without NPR enriching our lives with stories like these? Apparently, California spends more than a billion dollars every year maintaining a system that is now used by only 5% of consumers. That number decreases yearly but those of us who continue to...
Yesterday, I got a note from a friend about a blog post I had written about six weeks ago, called “Everything was fine – until it wasn’t.” Six weeks is a long time in the life of a blog post. The entries tend to get pancaked under the layers of entries that have followed them. I’m sure some of my favorite columnists would also have a hard time conjuring up the contents of pieces they wrote...
I want to start today with the wonderful news that Nathan Thrall received a Pulitzer Prize for his book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. I wrote about the book in a blog I posted not long after the start of the Gaza War. To refresh your memory, Thrall examines the many ways, small and large, in which the lives of Palestinians living in Israel are constrained, demeaned and oppressed by the...
My wife is reading one of the best books I’ve read in recent years, Nora Webster, by Colm Toibin. It’s the story of a recently widowed woman living in a small Irish village, trying to keep herself and her family afloat in the face of daunting obstacles. When I was walking past Rosellen’s chair on the way to the bathroom, she looked up and said, “You’re one of the few men I know who could...