I received this email from Amazon a few days ago: Note that I have been accused of something, but it is not specified. Note also that I have been warned not to do this something again that I did and which offends Amazon. Because I wanted to understand this astounding threat, I read the Customer […]
I love movies. Always have. When I was a kid, the Saturday afternoon kids’ double-feature was what I lived for Monday through Friday. I don’t remember the films – Westerns, for sure – but the one I recall from another day at the movies was “Ruby Gentry,” starring Jennifer Jones. Wow, she was hot, and […]
The two men were neighbors. They saw each other frequently, like today, while out walking their dogs. The white man, Ellis, had a doodle. The black man, Will, had a Lhasa Apso. The dogs had made friends first, and in their turn so had the men. They often stopped to chat for a few minutes […]
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, actually it wasn’t, but it was a kinda cloudy overcast day in Amsterdam, a little on the cool side because it was October, dreary but not as unpleasant as a dark and stormy night would be. I was walking along the Prinzengrachet, or Prince’s Canal, doing some […]
I recently heard a radio interview with author Jack Reid, who has written a new book entitled Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation. He was saying how, with particular respect to the Covid-19 pandemic, hitchhiking is decidedly out of fashion. Yup. But I was reminded of two significant hitchhiking experiences […]
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” — John Maynard Keynes The autonomous stretch limousine stopped again, then again, at various Manhattan street corners. Men ducked into it, one by one, until four were seated inside. Armored and electronically cloaked to Secret Service specifications, the limo turned onto […]
Not to be confused with Edward Bellamy’s fine novel, I stand at the cusp between 2019 and the 2020, the new decade of the new millennium. Looking backward, as my favorite book critic Dwight Garner writes in his latest “Critic’s Notebook” in The New York Times, about the year gone by and what, for him, […]