I've written a memoir because I sense that there's a real hunger right now for stories about straight, white, sixty-something men.
The Oscars were so predictable - not just the winners but their speeches - that the most surprising moment came when the former host of "The Man Show" said he wished he were a woman.
I recently accepted an invitation to join a book club (my first) and the book we will be discussing this evening is the one I suggested: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. He wrote it in part to show Americans that the Russian émigré community did not consist entirely – or at all – of rabid Trotskyites, but contained a large number of liberal intellectuals like himself. Today, when we hear the word “Russian” and think hacker or doper, the novel can serve the same corrective purpose.
Thanks to the voices from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, Florida students are replacing in the nation's consciousness Florida Man.
In Warsaw’s Powazki Cemetery rows of simple birch crosses mark the graves of young people who died fighting for their country. On November 1st every year, thousands of Poles pay their respects, their faces lit by candle glow. I thought of them this morning when I heard on the radio the names and ages of the victims in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. Perhaps we should devote a section of Arlington National Cemetery to all the people who’ve given their lives in American schools – and offices, churches, airports, movie theaters, concert spaces. It would stand as a reminder not of their bravery - which in some cases was exceptional - but of our cowardice.
Last week I mentioned to a friend that we were due for either a mass shooting or a terrorist attack. It wasn’t prescience; it was simply sad acknowledgment of the inevitable. Though with the first, it doesn’t have to be. There are measures that can be taken to ensure that guns don’t get into the wrong hands. Tragically, and incomprehensibly, we as a nation are unwilling to employ them.