Category Archives: News and politics

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s experience at Harvard Law School after the Civil War was not particularly stimulating.  The system of learning there was by rote.  The former Massachusetts regimental captain needed far more rigorous intellectual challenges.  After all, he had … Continue reading →

The purpose of this brief blog is not to be a full review of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer.  It is simply to describe that writer-director as a dramatic poet. In much earlier times playwrights were almost always poets.  A poet’s … Continue reading →

The question may be reasonably asked: but can a person ruin a funeral?  Funerals are, by definition, dreary events.  Yet as difficult as it may be to achieve, I have seen people ruin funerals on more than one occasion.  This … Continue reading →

For some reason I had never read the Diary of Anne Frank.  Not until a week ago.  The event that led me to this book was the miniseries A Small Light, presented by the National Geographic network.  In eight episodes, … Continue reading →

In March, 2020, the world seemed to shut down.  Suddenly there was no place to go, no people to see, no appointments to make. Within days of this happening, my mother was unable to walk.  An infection had spread to … Continue reading →

During the last years of her life, Alice Hammerstein Mathias was working on editing a book of the correspondence between herself and her father, Broadway’s great lyricist-librettist Oscar Hammerstein II.  When she died in 2015, the project seemed to be … Continue reading →

There is a Dictaphone recording my father made of my family when I was two years old.  My friend Paul is mentioned by someone in the recording. We’d moved into the Davis Street property, built over an old orchard, less … Continue reading →