If you think of Monopoly as too focused on accumulating property and money while destroying the competition, you might have liked the game that my best friend, Beth, and I spent countless hours of our pre-teen years playing on long summer evenings. Go for Broke was Monopoly’s counterpart. As the name suggests, the goal was...
One of the delights of being married to my husband is the fascinating people I get to meet. His interests and efforts attract a wide variety of individuals and we have forged many friendships with those who, in a more routine life, we might never get to meet. So it was, while COVID-19 was still...
A long-time Cuban immigrant to the United States, Martin Gurri, wrote a stirring paean to his adopted country for the nation’s 247th birthday. He poured out his gratitude for being an American and explained why America is truly exceptional. There was one fly in the ointment. Mentioning his 5-year-old grandson, he wrote that this child...
Marrying a man born and raised in the British Empire, who speaks the “authentic” English, expanded my vocabulary. While some words, like queue, made it into my daily speech, others, like bonnet for the hood of the car, never did. But there is one British word that I have gladly adopted, and think is much...
Does misery make strange bedfellows or is it politics that do so? In Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” makes its appearance in a very literal way as the king’s jester crawls under a cloak and finds himself with an unusual bedmate. In 1850, an American essayist massaged those words...
Psychological theories come and go. Sometimes, bogus ideas take hold and do damage as they embed themselves in society, while authentic ideas can lose popularity as they are not cutting-edge and exciting. I do not know if Erik Erikson’s stages of psycho-social development are in vogue now, but his views were what I remember from...
One of my enduring childhood memories is when I once suggested to a store owner that he had given me the wrong change. I must have been about eight years old, and the change included a Kennedy half-dollar, which I mistook for a quarter. The owner, with a touch of irritation, explained to me that...
Don’t you love reading something that sets you thinking? After mulling it over you might agree or disagree with what you read, but either way it stimulated your brain. I experienced just this while reading Mary Harrington’s book, Feminism Against Progress. When Ms. Harrington, who calls herself a “reactionary feminist” had a baby, it turned...
I recently spent quite a bit of time watching an 18-month-old with a penchant for climbing. He attempted to do incredibly foolish things. There was no explaining to him that the chair was likely to tip over, the fall from the staircase bannister would be unpleasant, and that the curtain was not mountain climbing gear....
It is easy to be an armchair hero. We prefer to picture ourselves as sheltering an escaping slave rather than closing our door to a desperate runaway. We lecture our children about coming to the aid of a bullied classmate, and we imagine ourselves intervening when we see an animal being beaten. Yet, until tested,...
