Category Archives: Uncategorized
Is it time to bring back irreverent humor?
Have you ever heard of shuttle jokes? Shortly after the Challenger disaster in January 1986, a bunch of jokes started circulating about it. Here is the least offensive of them: “Why does NASA drink Pepsi? Because they can’t get 7-Up.” Why would people joke about something as horrible as the death of seven astronauts? Or the …
Retiring the Links page
Program note: I had to retire a long-time feature of my website, the Links page. I started this website back in 1996. (You can see a copy of my site from 1999.) Before Google and search engine optimization, we promoted websites by exchanging links. Today, I get most of my visits from searches and social …
Charlottesville
I will get back to the Writing Reseda series, but I need to say a few things about what happened yesterday in Charlottesville, Virginia. Oddly enough, this is a story about Reseda and something that happened to me 40 years ago. It is about the first display of overt and direct anti-Semitism I ever experienced.
A prayer for Anthony Scaramucci
If you’ve been following my website, you’d assume that a member of the Trump administration would be the last person I’d express sympathy for — especially the (UPDATE: former) White House Communication Director Anthony Scaramucci. He went off on his fellow staffers as if someone told him to go get his shine box. (NSFW link, …
The cycle of outrage
Do you feel like you’re stuck in a hamster wheel of never-ending political news? No matter what bad or outrageous thing happens, something comes along to top it. There is no respite and no place to avoid it. It occupies your mind, hijacks your conversations, and shades your relationships. We are stuck in a cycle of …
