Jack Goldsmith isn’t worried about the NSA . He teaches at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law so he’s pretty confident about where the United States is going when it comes to its security agency. He predicts the cur

                  (Norman Rockwell painting courtesy of wikipedia.com)

One episode of the original Star Trek television series was a story about a technically advanced society that was flourishing in the midst of war. People wandered leisurely through the streets, drank lattes at sidewalk cafes amidst gleaming skyscrapers and well manicured landscapes. T

I picked up a copy of Beloved by Toni Morrison from my neighborhood library box the other day. The words on the cover were, “A Masterpiece…Magnificent.. Astounding.. Overpowering.” In the upper right hand corner was a seal, “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Having r

I don’t care for Joyce Carol Oates’ writing. Her style I shall call “lumpacious” — an excess of words and arthritic phrasings put to the service of despair and gloom without a ray of humor. Nonetheless, I struggle to keep an open mind; so when I came upon her short ficti

“Unless you’re a terribly bad writer, you are never going to have too many readers.” (The Dastardly Defender of Letters,” by Laura Bennett, New Republic, October 21, 2013, pg. 29)  I read the above statement twice, thinking I’d misunderstood Andrew Wylie, a top literary age

I love men. I’ve never been married, but I do love men. I love the way they compartmentalize their thoughts so that when faced with a problem they don’t want to handle, they don’t. They think about football instead. This ability to put off a crisis until tomorrow makes them seem

I want to change my insurance carrier. The papers have been sitting on my desk for nearly a month. I move them to the upper right hand corner, then to the left, then look for a drawer to hide them for a while. I really, really do want to take action but the task is too tedious. I have

I have a fan. Just one. But the enthusiasm of that one could compete with a gaggle of groupies. My fan reads my books, my blogs and even took the trouble to read my Christmas story, “Under the Bridge and Beneath the Moon,” published in Children’s Digest in 1988. Fans are like fa

I have a few friends, men mostly, who refuse to read fiction and that includes reading mine. Their excuse is they have so little time that when they do crack a book, the material must be significant. By inference, fiction has no significance – the fluffy pastime of women who sigh ov