FEATURED POSTS

Every morning I wake up and then all day and into the night I use what Steve Jobs invented to invent. Steve Jobs’ life is a testament to many things, I think, and many have been singled out, appropriately. I like that he is spoken of in the company of Edison. For me, his life […]

    On July 24, 1967, The Beatles release “All You Need Is Love.” If somehow, somewhere there were some promotional-director-in-the-sky who took care of these things, if somehow all of this were being done on purpose (as certainly we were sure it was), it could not have happened with more effect, nor at a […]

“As it grew dark, the white MGA convertible roadster I drove slipped and slithered on the snow-covered mountain road. I was with a friend, and we were late getting back to campus. Still, I pulled into a roadside diner where a television set hung up in one corner because I really did not want to […]

“In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after […]

Photo: Robert Altman Even before our world view guides us to discriminate between good and evil, it disposes us to discriminate between real and unreal, true and false, meaningful and meaningless. Before we act in the world, we must conceive of a world; it must be there before us, a sensible pattern to which we […]

David McCullough’s JOHN ADAMS was the book that got me started on AMERICAN STORY. “Of course, before you can care about any history you have to connect with it, and for most of my life I wasn’t connected at all. American history felt as lifeless as the faces on Mount Rushmore. The American Revolution? A […]

“In the spring of 1942, when Corregidor fell, and I joined the Marines, a glance at a global map would have convinced an impartial observer, were there any left, that our side was losing the war. Indeed, one could have argued persuasively that the Allies had already lost it,” writes William Manchester in his extraordinary […]

Rosanne Cash is on a roll. Her new autobiography Composed reached #16 on the New York Times best-sellers list (non-fiction), and #6 on the Los Angeles Times. On September 10 her latest CD The List won Best Album at the Americana Music Awards. I have known Rosanne Cash since the late 1980s when I met […]

From his 1959 book Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems “I was very Marxist in college, but couldn’t make it with the regular Commie bunch because of my individualistic-bohemian-anarchist tendencies, all much looked down upon. Of course, being the only real member of the proletariat in the bunch of them, the others being upper middle class […]

“Dylan hit a nerve for me, opened a door into a trove of barely distant memories when I was a grade-schooler and would be told to huddle under my desk in case of attack. I had grown up with Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove and had lived through the endless grade-B Japanese horror films where everything […]