My wife, Rosellen Brown, retired from her teaching position in the graduate writing program at the School of the Art Institute on May 12th, which also happened to be her 85th birthday. She had logged 28 years in that position, following 13 years at the University of Houston and a shorter time at Boston University. Add to that a number of workshops and residencies, most prominently 13 years at the...

The circus came to town this past weekend in the form of my son-in-law Ben Kintisch, all pumped up to perform the cabaret version of his musical called Life Review: The Hospice Musical. Those of you who are my Facebook friends have seen my postings about the event over the last few weeks, encouraging people to buy tickets for his house concert at our apartment. A little background. Ben has...

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...