Instead of watching the inauguration
Everything I saw and read in the lead-up gave me flashbacks to January 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed and trashed in the name of Trump under the banner of the Confederacy. I didn’t want to hear Carrie Underwood sing. Or watch Barack Obama and Joe Biden behaving with decorum while Trump told…
Read MoreSummer Fruit
All too soon, the produce aisles will be full of apples and pears, and while they will get me through the winter – for a few more weeks, I am bingeing on summer fruit – diverse, juicy, and sweet. Fruit is also the most provocative food group. The apple was alluring enough to have caused…
Read MoreMy first “Moth” story…
I was honored to be part of a program benefitting Brookline.news, a non-profit online source of reporting — a crucial service — in the “news deserts” in which so many of us now live. To see the whole program (six https://brookline.news/a-soviet-arrest-crashing-a-bat-mitzvah-and-dropping-out-at-age-14-brookline-storytellers-help-mark-one-year-anniversary-of-brooklines
Read More25 years ago .. Remembering the shooting at Columbine
This column was published 25 years ago in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. A whole generation — or is it two by now? — has grown up with the very real fear and present danger of school shoottings. The massacre at Columbine High School occurred six months before my daughter started high school, and…
Read MoreIris Apfel “Geriatric Starlet”
Iris Apfel — a fashion icon like none other — died on March 1 at the age of 102. The obituaries and testimonials were laudatory, affectionate and larded with more breathless adjectives than raisins in a fruitcake.I never met the woman in the flesh, but I did spend a couple of hours in 2009 with a selection from the contents of her amazing closet. And it changed the way I thought about my own closet
Read More2024: Audiobooks!
Good things happen in threes, right? And so it is that three of my Jewish guidebooks are being released as audiobooks this year. My novels became audiobooks soon after their print publication, but that was not the case for the five non-fiction guidebooks to contemporary Jewish life I wrote. It was no big surprise that…
Read MoreClimate Anxiety: Frogs, Ostriches, Canaries, Meerkats
It was hot on July 5, and I was determined to get into the water at Good Harbor Beach no matter how cold it was. Ocean temperatures on Cape Ann are famously chilly. July averages around 65 (F); in August, its averages 67(F), though it can be a cold as 60. As I walked from…
Read MorePeriod politics in Florida and Idaho
Trigger warning: Reading this might set your hair on fire. Earlier this month, Florida Republicans introduced and advanced a wave of bills on gender and diversity that, if passed, are likely to be signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). One GOP lawmaker acknowledged that his proposed sexual health bill would ban girls in grades…
Read MoreLosing Toby
Toby was my fourth dog. He was my COVID dog, my first shelter dog, first mutt. He was a ridiculously picky eater. He was my most photogenic dog. Toby had Milk Dud eyes, perky ears and a perfectly proportioned snoot (long but nothing like a snout). Once, he even stopped traffic — a big guy driving a construction…
Read MoreNew Baby? Hip Replacement? I’ve got a stamp for that
It started with a sympathy card I’d written to a friend after the death of her father, but I only had few pastel “Love” with a bunch of flowers. Pretty posies on that envelope seemed as inappropriate as putting an AIDS quilt stamp on a “Welcome Baby” card, so I headed to the post office…
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