I’ve often remarked that a writer writes because he or she must. Given that the craft involves frustration and even anguish, what am I saying about writers? That we’re masochists? No. I’m saying that when words are marshaled across a page in proper order and with a degree of ele

In my blog of 10/2/13, I proposed that we ban paper and go back to clay tablets. The suggestion was tongue in cheek, of course, a way of saying it would be nice to slow down the amount of information we generate, record and store. No one has taken up my suggestion and, happily, a book

A friend who lives in South Africa sent me a clipping from her Cape Town newspaper. The article complained about the growing bureaucracy in that country and called for reform. That bureaucratic bloat was beginning to show its ugly head there came as no surprise to me. Bloat is a natur

In an earlier blog (10/4/13), I wrote that I’d come home from the neighborhood library box with the work of Gabriel García Marquez, The General In His Labyrinth. The book is a fictional account of the last days of Simón Bolívar, the man who liberated Latin America from Spanish ru

If the Catholic Church has its way, the argument over women’s reproductive rights will be won not in the courts but through business acumen. How? By quietly taking over medical facilities, nursing homes, and insurance plans. According to Stephanie Mencimer, writing for Mother Jones,

A new word in the English language has recently been coined: investor-state. The term refers to corporations who have the power to sue nations before an jurisdictional tribunal for infringements on their commercial interest. Phillip Morris, for example, has sued Australia over that co

My November Vanity Fair came in the mail today and I have to say vanity is the operative word. This edition reads like a gossip column. It’s lead article is, “The 2013 New Establishment: Who’s Up, Who’s Down and Who’s Roadkill,” — to which I’d have liked to add, �

Marin Alsop is one of the few women to break the glass ceiling as a music conductor. After a period of controversy, she was chosen to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and she silenced her critics with a show of leadership, feminine style. (“She Shattered a Classic Glass Ceiling

Debora Spar, president of Barnard College has written a book about women having it all, fresh on the heels of Sheryl Sandberg’s, Lean In. It’s called, Wonder Women, Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection. Like Sandberg’s work, Spar confesses we women can’t have it all. We mus