“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Phillippe Sands, a noted International human rights lawyer, has written three books that each in its own way explore the lives of Nazi middle managers deeply involved in mass murder and genocide. The third book dealt with one of those Nazis who escaped to Chile and became involved with Auguste Pinochet’s death squads and torture centers that Pinochet set up after his coup overthrowing Allende in late 1973. None of […]
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I always come back to the Game I played at no level of expertise, but that doesn’t matter. The body remembers, even now, years after I’ve touched a ball. Muscle memory extends itself into emotional memory and when those memories are entangled with countless hours on courts with others but often alone with one’s imagination, a ball, a hoop, the dying light of winter afternoons, the infinite beauty of the […]
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Maybe this extended metaphor describes this summer of 2026, on the 513th day of Trump’s second term. You and I and other friends and family are having dinner in someone’s multi-story older home. We’re packed into a large dining room. We have good food before us. Our cars are in the driveway. We have money in our pockets. The sun is out. All through dinner though, plaster has been […]
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1 It’s been 16 years since I left teaching. As another retired friend said this week, “That feels like another life.” I don’t miss it. Nostalgia has always struck me as a dead end. Move or fade away I’ve always thought. But memory is different as long as one acknowledges one’s failures, as long as memory does not get mixed up with a dismissal of losses or regrets. I’m coming […]
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