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Aharon Pick’s Diary
Here’s what I’ve been up to: As a young man, my grandfather had a friend named Aharon Pick. The two of them collaborated on a project to collect Yiddish folksongs in and around their hometown, Keidan, in Lithuania. My grandfather emigrated to the U.S. in 1904; Aharon Pick went to France, where he graduated from Read more
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A 50-year civil war?
Jill Lepore argues in The New Yorker that the Kent State shootings, of which today is the 50-year anniversary, followed by those at Jackson State in Mississippi, followed by the “Hard Hat Riot” in New York (in which construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters) began a civil war that continues today, with Trump’s shock Read more
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The Information Problem
A friend who works as a public-health researcher was complaining the other day that the various guidelines being issued by state and federal agencies, supposed to tell us all how to behave during the coronavirus pandemic, seemed vague and general. Yes, we grasp the concept of social distancing, means, and the meaning of “stay home” Read more
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Brassed Off
I’ve been a Jules Feiffer fan for as long as I can remember. To my 1960s teenage mind, his cartoons and animations put him squarely in that olympian world of hip, intellectual Greenwich Village. He was in a pantheon that included comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May, and publications like the Read more
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Empathy Check
Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” You can decide where 97,000 — roughly the number of deaths from COVID-19 that have been recorded thus far — falls on that spectrum, but it seems clear that we have entered a zone in which the Read more
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Dr. Golden Hands
The piece triggered a powerful memory for me from June, 1999: My dad, then aged 79, was in Columbia-Presbyterian, being operated on for a life-threatening condition called aortic stenosis; Read more
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