(a reprise from DCJ Archives, 11.2.2003) For a variety of reasons I’ve never cared much for the month of November. But rather than go into that, I enclose a piece…
After seventeen blissful years—certainly longer than most marriages and relationships—Gudrun and I are splitting up. Nothing is forever, but I was hoping she would carry to the very end. It…
We all know that President Obama is half-white, or half-black (or the other way round, if you prefer). I once naively wondered that the election of a racially-mixed man to…
Last week, my mother, at 94, but looking maybe 80, slipped from a peaceful unconsciousness to wherever consciousness goes when the corpus will no longer contain it. Wherever that consciousness…
We humans tend to think of ourselves as an enlightened species. No question that we are different in some essential respects from the other species with whom we share out…
The French Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill banning the burqa-style Islamic veil on public streets and other places. The measure affects less than 2,000 women, but it has been…
I consider myself fortunate that I never regarded my occupation as “labor.” I never regarded it as “work” either (although it involved effort), or a “job” even though I was…
I remember the first time I ever set foot on a university campus. It was the winter recess of my eighth grade and a few of my friends and myself…
The great Lower Manhattan Mosque Brouhaha (LMMB) seems, at first, like plainly a contest between the principled and the pig-headed. By now we all know, but some remain unwilling to…
(With apologies to Louis Bruñel) Americans would never use the French term for the social class that is the equivalent of the venerable “American Dream.” But we occupants of the…