_{Age regressioned Portrait of Martha Washington by Micheal J. Deas www.michaeldeas.com}

The brouhaha which surrounds the David Barton book, Jefferson Lies, has made me wonder what is it that makes one history book more popular than another? Moreover, why do we persist on wanting to… Read full post »

I am a city person and one of the first things that I marveled at when I moved to the New Jersey suburbs was that most people did not have much clutter in their houses. They also did not have any books that were visible. I grew up seeing… Read full post »

Last month I bought my grave site in an ancient church yard. It is actually two places for “cremains”.   After I read Mary Roach’s Stiff-The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, I walked around for two weeks looking at everyone as if they were meat half… Read full post »

I sat down on a bench to rest in front of Memorial Sloane Kettering. I had just visited my friend Wendy on the Upper East Side. I had put in a lot of miles in walking and was trekking toward Penn Station. There is no better way to travel in… Read full post »

I was going to write about my uncomfortable experience of sitting in the Bowery Poetry Club listening to my childhood friend recount a story of my first kiss and emergent adolescent sexuality to a room full of strangers from her memoir. But somehow this story gets even more peculiar.

 Through… Read full post »

I was raised in New York City. Many of us New York City kids share a common bond when we move out to the New Jersey suburbs: A fear of driving. We all grew up hearing that New Jersey drivers were the worst (next to Boston drivers). Growing up… Read full post »