While everyone has  been pouring over the 92,000 unauthorized documents released by Wikileaks about the progress of our war in Afghanistan, I'm busy rereading a seventeen-page report from  two seasoned Washington Post reporters, Dana Priest and William Arkin: their summary… Read full post »

Thinking of family makes me sad. Not for reasons you might imagine: absent or abusive father, distant or alcoholic mother, bullying siblings. I grew up happy and healthy, a middle child in a mid-western, middle-class, middle American suburb. Our extended family (eight cousins from three families) c… Read full post »

Just as the war on immigration is heating up in the west comes word of a new coalition that promises support for our beleaguered president. A group of market-savvy Christian evangelicals is coming out in support of immigration reform, with an emphasis on smoothing the path to legal status for… Read full post »

I've been catching up on the highly original FX series "Justified" and not only because of the incredibly sizzling Timothy Olyphant, but because the moral ambiguities it scatters across the Kentucky landscape feel so absolutely dead-on.  You do what you have to do and if you don't turn&… Read full post »

 I love celebrating Independence Day. I'm grateful to live in this country, grateful for the freedoms we often take for granted. I plant my Independence Day petunias (red white and purple but who's quibbling?)  and stick a little flag in the flower pot by my front door.  My husb… Read full post »

There are any number of ways to teach writing or purport to teach writing, just as there are many ways to write. And there's something to be said for perfecting the craft, learning what makes a meaningful narrative arc or what constitutes a gripping opening or a powerful closing.

But… Read full post »

My father, I could say, was larger than life, but what does that mean? As the youngest (and smallest) son of a well-known judge, he didn't fully come into his own until his father and one of his brothers passed. The parallels, on a much smaller scale,… Read full post »

One of my favorite Saturday Night Live characters was Tommy Flanagan, Pathological Liar. Flanagan, created and played with gusto by Jon Lovitz during SNL’s late-eighties seasons, never met a fact he couldn’t embellish, exaggerate and outright twist. He’d start small (“/… Read full post »

 Every few years I flirt with the idea of becoming a vegetarian. Look at Gwyneth Paltrow; she makes it work. At the very least, I promise to cut out beef. Really, who needs that fat? Those hormones? The carcinogens kicked up by the grill (because of course you're grilling)? What with/… Read full post »

 It’s official. New York/New Jersey will host the February 2014 Super Bowl in the new Meadowlands outdoor arena. Yes, it’s the first time a Super Bowl will be hosted in an outdoor stadium in the middle of winter but we New York and New Jersey people are a hardy bunch. Actually,… Read full post »

I've had a bad week. Lousy weather, upset stomach and a kind of post-partum like depression following the release of my book. Or maybe it's more like the end of a wild, crazy affair. Book and I were together day and night for four years. Now he's gone, with vague promises to… Read full post »

Oh no, not another one. Not another smart, ambitious, career-oriented, fifty-something single woman nominated for the Supreme Court. What is the President thinking? It's not just that she knew what she wanted to be early on and focused on achieving her goals. It's not just that she's exce… Read full post »

By now everyone and their mother has heard about, read about, or seen Betty White’s star turn on “Saturday Night Live.” White, at 88 the oldest host the show has ever had, was recruited thanks to a huge fan movement on Facebook. Mission accomplished: White demonstrated why sh… Read full post »

One of the biggest challenges any writer has is to balance between putting too little or too much of himself into his work. Too much, and the writer’s voice threatens to overwhelm the material. Too little and the narrative takes on a detached quality, which is often less interesting to the… Read full post »

it's not as obvious nor as important as you might imagine

I once opened for the Village People:

Lewis Black once opened for me:  

I once opened the door on a robbery in progress: 

I wro… Read full post »

If you've been tooling around the blogosphere, particularly amongst the writings of the so-called conservative intelligentsia, you may have run into the words "epistemic closure." The phrase seems to have originated with conservative blogger Julian Sanchez, who admits on his blog that he's gi… Read full post »

M  om asked me to "put an end to her misery" only twice; but she asked my sister dozens of times. Fully immobilized by a succession of strokes, she was daily roused by the kindest caretakers imaginable, dressed, fed, propped up in a wheelchair too small for her spreading frame,… Read full post »

I can’t help but wonder if  America has become the nation of “no.” We certainly see it in Congress, where Democrats call Republicans “the party of no.” Truly, many members of the GOP appear to have decided to veto anything the Dems or the White Hou… Read full post »

I never knew my mother’s mother; she died three months before I was born. Within a year, my grandfather had remarried his second cousin--a 52-year old single New York City working woman we came to know as Aunt Ray. She was a tiny dynamo of 4'6" and she filled my grandfather's… Read full post »

Blame today's headlines: In M… Read full post »

Y es, I'm pleased some sort of health care reform has passed, no matter that it's flawed, incomplete, and somewhat cumbersome. And thank goodness some of its benefits are kicking in before November rolls around. Fingers crossed, we might find ourselves free of some of the more inane and… Read full post »

 Rumors have been flying that both France President Nicholas Sarkozy and his wife, singer/model Carla Bruni, have strayed. By American standards, things are pretty far along: Bruni is said to have fallen in love and moved in with popular French singer Benjamin Biolay. Meanwhile/… Read full post »

I've been afraid of something or other for most of my life. When I was a kid, it was dogs off-leash, were-wolves, unexplained deaths, prejudice, and world unrest. For a while it was about  never finding love, never being relevant, never finding my passion. Now it's  guns carried… Read full post »

A  series of billboards in Georgia are linking abortion with supposed "efforts" by various groups to reduce or limit the size of the black population. The ads first surfaced at the beginning of February, in time for Black History Month and have gradually been reported in the mainstream p… Read full post »