September 2012
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There's been so much noise about Governor Romney stonewalling calls to release his tax returns and so much commentary about the one he did release, that the anomalies in running-mate Paul Ryan's tax returns have been overlooked. When Ryan made his 2011 taxes public, he had to "amend" what he and his lobbyist wife had initially…
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I read with enthusiasm Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (New York, 2012), a pop biology book which describes various plants and animals that originated millenia ago and that survive outwardly unchanged to the present day. It's a great subject and might have been a great book if Fortey had been less anecdotal and more informative, and if he not…
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At the Perfect Pear, our local eatery, dinner was less than ambrosial, but halfway through the mashed potatoes, the room was suddenly illuminated by an astonishingly beautiful young woman who arrived (drums, and trumpets, and more trumpets) with bland boyfriend in tow. She was lambent and glowing — so lovely that I felt the urge to get up…
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Here's a case of double amnesia, in which a second case of the disease is overlain over the first (as usual, once the amnesia genie is activated, screenwriters cry havoc and let slip the dogs of anything goes). Our hero, played by a tired Liam Neeson, awakes from a coma not remembering much but thinking he's…
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Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read. Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement – a…
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Grandma (affectionately): "You're a silly duckling." Lola (age 2+): "I'm not a duckling. I'm a people."