Turkey Day tradition
Thanksgiving. It is one of my favorite times of year. The leaves are changing colors, the nights are much crisper, [...]
Braingiving
With Turkey Day coming up again, I was perusing my notes on various menus, all including pumpkin of some sort, [...]
Film: “John Candy: I Like Me”
Hollywood actor John Candy wasn’t a leading man, much less a major film star, but when he died prematurely at [...]
Mother, scholar, feminist
When I finished my dissertation last summer, surreptitiously becoming a doctor of philosophy, I reposted the Facebook announcement sent out [...]
The mystery of Liar’s Dice
Liar's Dice, as played in bars and nightclubs in San Francisco, is for two or more patrons and involves deception as [...]
Lessons from Mussolini
During the thirty years I lived in Italy, at dinner parties, there was one statement that was sure to shut [...]
Film: “28 Years Later”
Films and TV series about zombies are all the rage these days. The extraordinary success of the cable series “The [...]
Gently weeping
This is a love story that could easily slip through the cracks if you let it. I won’t and can’t, [...]
Photo essay: Twin Towers
As I was scurrying through Newark Airport’s Terminal C on my return trip to Paris in late September, the [...]
Lost worlds
Just before the COVID-19 pandemic flooded the planet, my job was supporting people with learning disabilities to live and build [...]
Review: The Maniac
Three years after Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World debuted as a bestselling translation of historical metafiction [...]