Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JULY 9, 2026 – (Cont.) The reasons I say The Oppermanns is “a book for our times,” are chilling against the backdrop of what we’re now witnessing in America. I don’t suggest by this that one epoch is identical to another. History doesn’t “repeat itself” as an exercise in klecksography. No inkblot on the page …
JULY 7, 2026 – (Cont.) As mentioned above, the Oppermanns are a family of achievers, whose inspiration was their paternal grandfather, a successful furniture manufacturer and retailer in Berlin, whose modest straightforward company motto was, “Oppermann customers buy good goods cheaply.” He’d gotten his start as a supplier of goods to the German armies during …
JULY 6, 2026 – (Cont.) As is the case with most great art and literature, The Oppermanns is art reflecting life—specifically, a critical phase of the life of the author, Lion Feuchtwanger. Much of what shapes the outlook of Gustav Oppermann, a central character in the book, the artistic mirror, is the writer reflecting on …
JULY 5, 2026 – Today I completed my reading of The Oppermanns, a masterfully conceived and crafted novel by the inimitable German-Jewish novelist and playwright, Lion Feuchtwanger (1884 – 1958). It was one of those books that leaves one breathless—and knowing that the work deserves to be reread, and more deeply analyzed, with the likely …
JULY 4, 2026 – To be honest, for me, the Bicentennial was a much bigger deal than the Semiquincentennial.[1] This inverted perspective is counter-intuitive: after all, “a quarter of a millennium” (or “half of half a millennium”) is much grander-sounding than “two centuries.” If celebration at the 200-year mark years warranted a few extra “bombs …
JUNE 29, 2026 – We’ve all grown accustomed to “news inundation,” much of it arising out of outrageously bad governance in the nation’s capital. Some of the outrageous—the reflecting pool, for example—makes a mockery of the very real but unaddressed needs of Americans. Other aspects of the outrageous—the continuing campaign to round up people for …
JUNE 27, 2026 – This morning I shot off an order for a couple of new books—The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies by Susan Stokes, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a …
JUNE 26, 2026 – The most famous opening line in British literature is, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, …
MAY 22, 2026 – Yesterday, I attended a quarterly board meeting of a non-profit organization, with which I’ve been involved for some years, the World Press Institute. Its 65-year (thus far) mission is to promote free and open journalism around the world. The founding concept was an annual fellowship program anchored here in the U.S. …
MAY 19, 2026 – Today at high noon I joined two other lawyers with whom I’d teamed up in a contested real estate matter for the past two years. What had started out as the prospective sale of farmland turned into a full-blown lawsuit, including a protracted appeal, followed ultimately, by a closing on a …
MAY 18, 2026 – . . . North Korea! Or more precisely, Kim Jung-un. Or more accurately, the loser is . . . the United States and nuclear non-proliferation. Now that the Republicans have settled on a ratio existendi ex post facto for the war against Iran—namely, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of …
MAY 9, 2026 – Yesterday I heard a story from the horse’s mouth, as it were—that is, testimony that was non-hearsay. Though the story wasn’t told under oath, the witness was eminently trustworthy and credible. The cautionary tale was a chilling firsthand account of authoritarianism. Moreover, the example wasn’t an abstraction or something that “happens …
MAY 8, 2026 – In continuation of the pursuit of continuing legal education (“CLE”) credits, I’m in the middle of a six-hour webinar symposium on “Universal and Quality Health Care,” sponsored by the University of St. Thomas School of Law (St. Paul, MN). Again, along with a host of UST-sponsored CLE courses on constitutional law …
MAY 5, 2026 – Sooner or later it was bound to happen: the Teflon would suffer a big scratch. Heretofore . . . The “Access Hollywood tape”? Ancient history. The “perfect phone call”? No one remembers—or cares. January 6? A Democratic plot. DOGE butchery without accounting? Old news, forgotten pain. ICE? Same. Assaults on the …
MAY 4, 2026 – My work-week routine is to consult briefly my sundry information sources as they stand at the top of the day, then head out on my well-traveled hour-long path to, throughout and back from “Little Switzerland.” I often use hiking time to mull over potential material for the day’s blog post. Today …
MAY 1, 2026 – Long before the Trump Era, I used to muse that “In America one could find the best of life and the worst of life.” This observation was not particularly insightful. After all, we have a population of around 340 million living within 3.8 million square miles spread across 58 degrees of …
APRIL 30, 2026 – Today while I was striding along toward the end of my daily walk, with both hiking poles now in one hand, I heard a neighbor call out. M. was out walking her aging canine friend and approaching the quiet intersection I’d just crossed. I acknowledged her greeting, and since I was …
APRIL 19, 2026 – If ever there were a case for the superiority of experts over amateurs, we’re seeing it play out in the current fiasco over Iran. According to the latest reporting, the sometime Appalachian memoirist JD Vance,[1] along with the stereotypical New York real estate developer Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, all-around grifter …
APRIL 6, 2026 – I’m afraid my brain has gone rogue again, at least in my dreams. What worries me further is the power of suggestive writing—that is, making something occur simply by writing about it. The reader will recall that in last Friday’s post, I described variations of the recurring “litigation dream,” similar to …
MARCH 11, 2026 – I remember watching/listening to portions of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee back in 2022. She gave a credible account of herself—erudite, respectful, genuine, articulate, and a methodical thinker. Based on her C.V. and on what I observed, I thought—Yes, she seems well qualified to …
FEBRUARY 5, 2026 – White House Border Czar Tom Homan—Gruppenführer Gregory Bovino’s replacement as overseer of “Operation Metro Surge”—announced yesterday a 700-agent drawdown from the purported 3,000 ICE agents and Border Patrol agents on the loose in Minnesota, mostly in the Twin Cities metro area. Ask people on the ground here, however, and no one …
FEBRUARY 3, 2026 – (Cont.) The dramatic conclusion of Into the Bright Sunshine features the clash between advocates of civil rights and protectors of states’ rights at the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. In that era, party platforms carried far more weight than they do today, and the intra-party fight over the civil rights plank …
FEBRUARY 2, 2026 – On July 6, 2016 Philando Castile was shot and killed by a policeman during a routine traffic stop here in Minnesota. The shooting occurred less than half a mile from our quiet, leafy, liberal—and by way of our complacency, racist—town of Falcon Heights (pop. 5,200). Within a single news cycle, news …
FEBRUARY 1, 2026 – I’ve written about him several times on this blogsite, most recently on September 7, 2025: our neighbor, the inimitable “Mr. Paulson,” literary savant, retired honors English teacher at Roseville High, life-long coach, and honorary scout for the Twins. Our paths often cross as he’s out walking the family’s ancient canine and …
JANUARY 31, 2026 – I’ve known lots of conservatives ever since I was old enough to parrot my two older sisters as we romped around the house in the fall of 1960 shouting, “Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man . . . Let’s put Kennedy in the garbage can!” I was in first grade and didn’t …