I won’t hazard a guess as to whether it achieves immortality like “grassy knoll” or “hanging chads,” but surely the phrase “bomb cyclone storm” will remain in the public consciousness of those who endured its cruelties. We’ll laugh about this someday, but right now an awful lot of Americans have a “single digit” they’d like […]

Decades ago, Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt warned: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, i.e., the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false, i.e., the standards of thought, no longer exist.” With that quote […]

Some years are sure to end up in historical memory. 2022 is one of them. Russia launched a land war in Europe long after people thought that World War II had ended such conflicts. The economy underwent basic changes as people began to deal with the true costs of what they need and want. And […]

The better part of a century ago, one of the great literary debates involved two American-born poets, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, whose followers vied for primacy. Both were hailed as innovators who discarded existing practices — Frost with his chapter-length narratives in “North of Boston,” Eliot for his wildly eclectic “The Waste Land.” Over […]

It was late December of 2020. COVID cabin fever was hitting me hard. As a writer and communications consultant, I’ve long worked from an office in my home. I was used to working alone at home, but COVID isolation was pushing me beyond my limits. Family issues were also weighing me down. My father, then […]