Unfortunately, the threat of nuclear war looms as possible today as it did when I was a child. I no longer practice hiding under my desk whenever a siren goes off, but I shudder to read Vladimir Putin’s cavalier talk about using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in his stalemated war.

Words matter, and the right words matter most of all, according to writer John Birmingham.  History bears this out. During World War II, Winston Churchill’s speeches galvanized Londoners with hope despite the German Blitzkrieg. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties, and

Even in a time of war, there can be moments of laughter. Late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert had a field day with a report about a Ukrainian grandmother who knocked down a Russian drone from her apartment balcony with a jar of tomatoes.  Equally low tech but less funny was a re

As I relate in my upcoming memoir, Getting Lost to Find Home, during the rainy season in Sub-Saharan Africa deluges force creatures to rise from their holes in the earth to escape being drowned.  A person out of doors at such times is likely to encounter black mambas, scorpions, flyi

The anniversary may have escaped many of us, but 2022 is the year in which the film, Soylent Green is set.  The story depicts a time when human activity has so depleted natural resources, humans can no longer grow crops to sustain themselves.  The living survive by eating the dead.�

At twilight, when the sky was a faint wash of blue, my mother sometimes caught me sneaking out of our apartment for one last game of hide-and-seek with neighborhood pals.  “It’s not safe, after dark,” she’d scold, shaking her finger at me. “But mama, plenty of kids are arou

The thief was furious when he found a 4-year-old child strapped into the back seat of the car he’d stolen.  His response was to slam on the brakes and reverse direction.  Finding the mother newly emerged from the grocery store with a gallon of milk, he scolded her for leaving her

I used to think I was a reasonably informed person, but President Donald Trump has taught me what passes as information can often be fake.  Take the banana, for example. In the ‘60s and ’70s, it would never be mistaken for a work of art. But since Trump has been in office, realit

I love Russian literature.  Much of it is pessimistic, of course.  If a bright future lies ahead, it will come in another lifetime.  Certainly, that’s the view of Anton Chekhov. (Click) At the very least, I find this point of view eccentric.  A Russian countess in Dostoevsky’s

In the 1960s, Peter Weiss stunned the world with his play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. The story depicts a French asylum in 1808 in which the inmates re-enact