This will be my last posting in July. We leave for the annual pilgrimage to our Happy Place in New Hampshire on the 16th. Happy it may be but it’s not an easy place from which to do the kind of electronic business required by blog posting. Besides, I can use some recharging time before we enter a really consequential run-up to Election Day. We’ll be back in Chicago in time for the Democratic...

These past two weeks have been one of the darkest periods in our history. I’ll put aside the disastrous debate and focus on the Supreme Court’s tornado of end-of-term decisions, which clear the path for the creation of an authoritarian, fascistic government if Trump returns to office. It’s a classic blueprint for how to stage a coup through skillful use of the existing, seemingly democratic...

The first presidential debate of 2024 is now history. I wrote the following piece as a kind of prequel to that debate, something separate from analyzing that event in the way so many pundits have done in the last several days. Let me take you back to where this whole odd political tradition of questionable value was born. In September 1960, I left the only home I had known since infancy, our...

This will be brief because my brain is not completely rewired after a trip across six time zones. The day after we returned from our trip to London, I heard an interview with an “expert” on jet lag. Her recommendations were a mix of sensible suggestions about controlling caffeine intake and insanely complex protocols for moving your biological clock in fifteen-minute increments, beginning weeks...

If you haven’t read Proust’s sprawling novel Remembrance of Things Past and you consider yourself a serious reader, it’s time to get to work. In the early days of Covid, I created a list of classics, particularly lengthy ones that I wanted to immerse myself in during that rare period of enforced isolation. Even though I had read the book almost half a century earlier, I remembered so little I...