Neither Stops the Tide The poet May Aygun, author of the poetry collection Roots and Winds, wrote: Life comes in waves,You never know which ones break,Which ones carry,Neither stops the tide,Only shapes your story. I am thinking of the ocean…
A number of novels, throughout our history, have described actions taken by controlling regimes to maintain power, and to curb and control the information they spread, or withhold from, those of us they hold as a captive audience. In George…
Making America Sick Again Throughout the anti-health tenure of the seriously disturbed Secretary of Escalating Failure, Robert Kennedy Jr, we have seen America begin to increasingly suffer from diseases long thought to have been conquered: measles, whooping cough, polio, tetanus.…
Bread and Circuses In the 1st Century AD, the Roman poet, Juvenal, wrote, in his work titled Satire X, “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who…
Halloo everybody! I’m taking a quick break before the publication of my book on October 6th and just wanted to give you a heads up! Here it is and the links to bookstores, if you want to jump the gun,…
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Like so many pithy lines attributed to British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, this is yet another he never actually said. However, it does echo his famous speech to the British people as they…
Knowledge Is Power I have long been fascinated with how tenaciously authorities have worked throughout history to deny books, and even the ability to read, to particular segments of their populace. Or, they have chosen to make the written word…
A few months ago, the federal government announced it was appropriating 17.5 billion dollars to build ten new nuclear power plants by 2030, created solely for the purpose of generating enough additional electricity to power the rapidly burgeoning, and troublingly…
Get Thee to a Nunnery In Act Three of Hamlet, the young prince says to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery, go. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of…
Before I begin, I want to honor and commemorate my incredible Sacramento Chief of Staff, Carol Wallisch, who passed away last Sunday. For fourteen years, she was the calm in every storm, the encouragement when others said “you can’t do…
What We Were Not Albert Camus was a political journalist, novelist (The Stranger and The Plague) and essayist known for his absurdist work. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was thinking of a quote attributed to him this…
Zeus’ Law Recently, I became one of the millions around the world who have seen Christopher Nolan’s new retelling of the ancient tale of The Odyssey. I was particularly touched by one central theme running throughout the film, the recounting of…
Historian and futurist, Nils Gilman, wrote a piece earlier this year in his substack, “Small Precautions”, positing that, although the words “secret police” tend to conjure up images of the Gestapo or the Stasi or the KGB, should we place…
In the late 70s, when I first became involved with the Sojourn Shelter for Battered Women and Their Children, the first thing co-founder Ariana Manov did was to take all of us volunteers through an in-depth training on the wide-spread…
In trying to write that portion of my life that intersected with our global experience of the pandemic, I couldn’t seem to get the phrase “she’s come all undone” out of my head. Everything we took for granted had begun…
