COMMENTARY

2020 Human beings are by nature social creatures, and when they finally emerge from isolation after the COVID-19 pandemic has run its course I expect Americans will party, party, party like there’s no tomorrow because, well, it turned out there was a tomorrow after all. It’s going to be the …

I’m not a vindictive person. I’m really not. Not anymore, anyway. But, like everyone else, I do get irritated from time to time and feel an urge to lash back. Now, I know advice columnists are fond of telling people that rude behavior should never be countered by rude behavior. …

2020             Way back when I was a little kid growing up in the years immediately following World War II, our villains were Indians and cowboys who always wore black hats in the movies or on TV. The next generation of villains were Nazis and Commies. Then came Arab terrorists. …

2006             Now that a century has passed, the truth can be told. You’ve all heard about Pavlov’s Dog. In 1903 Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov delivered a paper to the International Medical Congress in Madrid entitled “The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals” which dealt with conditioned reflexes. Two years …

2018 Half a century ago Congress had the House Un-American Activities Committee as its watchdog to investigate threats to our republic from within and without. Initially given the cumbersome title of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities in 1934, in …

2017 In my 69th year on this planet I must, at long last, accept that I am mortal. Chuck Berry is dead.             For decades I have hitched my lifespan to that of rock’n’roll’s first superstar, and as a charter member of the rock’n’roll generation, for very good reason. Rock stars …

2005 We all remember from our high school history classes that America was named in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who followed Christopher Columbus to the New World. It was the German geographer and cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, who translated the accounts of Vespucci’s explorations, who suggested the name. …

2006             If it’s true that there is no such thing as bad publicity, that there is only publicity … well, sign me up for some. There’s a lot of publicity going around these days regarding plagiarism, and I’m not certain that the publicity is …

2006 One of the gifts I received from my wife last Christmas was the 16th edition of “Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader,” a riveting compendium of trivia and minutiae. One page was devoted to archaic, unusuable English words. Naturally, being a writer, I felt challenged to put the unusable to some …