There’s a time to speak and a time to be silent. This is the latter. I will add my voice to those of the many Facebook friends who complained this week that they couldn’t focus on their own work. The distraction of the then unresolved election shut out any thoughts other than those necessary for daily survival, so there were no brilliant new ideas crying out to be posted. Besides what is there to...
Most of you will be reading this on the day before the election or during a time when the outcome is still uncertain. The election has occupied so much of our collective brain space for the past year that it’s hard to imagine writing about anything else at this moment, but I’m not sure what thread of the tangle that’s accumulated I want to honor in my eleventh hour wrap up. Ages ago I directed a...
As the weather begins to tilt toward winter, one of the President’s lies that carries an especially toxic sting is that the pandemic is “rounding the corner.” The evidence to the contrary is everywhere in plain sight, both here at home and around the world. That means a continuation of the current constraints that most of us have resigned ourselves to, at least until spring, when the magical...
“The Army Rolls Out a New Weapon: Strategic Napping.” That was the headline on an October 1st article in the New York Times. I found it very heartening that the army, that repository of so much of our culture’s machismo, was lifting the stigma from an activity that has been seen as a sign of weakness, of – God Forbid – femininity. The army’s announcement joins those from various college campuses...
During these months of isolation, near total for many of us, pet owners’ emotional lives have become even more enmeshed in the lives of the dogs, cats, rabbits and more exotic creatures that may be their passion. Dogs have never been better walked and cats have never had less time to be in full solitary control of their domiciles. A few months into the quarantine, our beloved cat died at age 18...