In the wake of 911, a debate is raging about the government’s right to store our phone messages and emails indefinitely. At the same time, there’s a deafening silence about similar intrusions from the private sector. Everyone knows that “cookies” follow us when we shop the int

Not long ago, a playwright looking for capitol to produce his play invited Facebook friends to a site where they could safely contribute. Until that moment, I was unaware such sites existed. Apparently they do, places where someone can make a modest donation to a dream. The process is

Last week, I received the same message 3 times on my Yahoo email account. Someone had entered my correct password from a different computer, it warned. My first impulse was to open the message to discover the perpetrator, then I thought better of it. I emailed my web manager, instead.

The longer I live, the more I marvel at my assumption that when I sling my foot over the edge of my bed each morning the ground will be there. I also marvel that we puny homo sapiens pursue “truth” as if the universe could be filtered through the tiny slits of our eyes, the tiny h

I remarked in an earlier blog that I understood why Ezra Pound resorted to inserting foreign words into some of his poetry. Sometimes English doesn’t have the right expressions to convey an idea or feeling. Frankly, I’d like the freedom to make up my own words like Lewis Carroll d

Truman Capote’s claim to have originated the journalistic novel could have been disputed by James Agee had he been alive. (“Truth Born of a Lie”, blog 5/23/13) In 1936 Agee, on assignment for Fortune magazine, was sent to Alabama to write about the life of cotton sharecroppers d

Writing a memoir is fashionable these days and because self-publishing is inexpensive, many of them land on Amazon beside Ernest Hemingway’s Moveable Feast and Winston Churchill’s autobiography about his participation in the Boer War. To be honest, most of them read like calendars

In this fast paced world of communication, I’m beginning to question who’s making the rules for our behavior? Peggy Post might be one. She writes a Good Housekeeping column where she grinds out answers for folks who feel they need direction. The other day a woman complained about

Though I take the usual precautions to avoid dying, there are times when I feel trapped in my body and would like to get out. Maybe what I’m looking for is a vacation from myself, but I think it’s more than that. I imagine there’s a door hidden deep in my mind, which, if opened,

Susan Stoner’s third mystery in her turn of the 19th century series features undercover detective Sage Adair at the top of his game. A labor strike, a union leader framed for murder, a rag picker poet and collapsing city bridges in the Pacific Northwest makes a tasty stew of murder