An unfamiliar number on my cell phone. When I say hello, a man’s voice informs me, sounding anxious and angry, that there will be a hearing for Walter David Kemp in three days. I know that name all too well, but I do not immediately recognize the voice. I am scrambling for […]
When 9-11 happened I was teaching at the University of Illinois. My wife was six weeks pregnant with our first son. We were getting ready for work but stopped to watch the Towers fall on TV, as most of the rest of the world did, and wondered what it all meant. You probably […]
Start with small seats on the aircraft, smaller all the time, it seems, and the expectation that flights will be full, and no room in the overhead bins, so your bag goes under the seat in front of you, and your feet get pinned in place, knees bent tighter than 90 degrees for […]
Larry Elder, the Republican candidate in the California gubernatorial recall race, was chased from a homeless encampment yesterday, one of his campaign stops. The first question is, why would Elder, a conservative, fish for votes among the homeless. Any campaign operative would say that is a waste of time for him: how many of […]
On this day (September 9), 94 years ago, jazz drummer Elvin Jones was born in Pontiac, Michigan, to a musical family. He cut his teeth as a professional musician in post-WWII Detroit, a hothouse of great Black musicians that included his brothers, Thad, a cornetist, who went to considerable fame as co-leader of […]
Milestones rehearse and punctuate our memories—but in the case of Afghanistan, history never had a chance to cool. Twenty years after 9/11, we are left wondering: Could we have made more of a difference? To what extent will Taliban rule oppress women and shelter future terrorists? Should we have even tried nation-building, or […]
When I was single and grumbling about it, my mother used to say, “All it takes is a day.” One shift of the kaleidoscope, one chance meeting, and bitter loneliness drops away and the world glows with promise. That fast, your life has a different direction, a different set of possibilities. This is […]
As I write this, the World Superyacht Awards are wrapping up here, in the Monte-Carlo Sporting, the big venue for society fundraising in Monaco. Guests are moving slowly from the champagne reception into the festive Salles des Etoiles, where they will have dinner, and soon Neptune awards will be handed out to boat […]
I tried to chase one once. Finally stopped, dizzy and breathless, and just watched the loops and swoops, sunlight shining through those transparent, delicately veined wings, the spindly body a bright iridescent blue, like it grabbed a piece of the rainbow and kept it to wear. Even trying to […]
We have an old bottle of Macallan whisky given to us by my in-laws, who were Scottish immigrants in the 1950s. They told us that a family friend was a foreman at the Macallan distillery, and he gifted them the bottle on the eve of the Japanese buying the distillery, because everything was […]
