Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
AUGUST 2, 2026 – In a previous post, I misstated (2015) by one year, the pub date (2014) of the book I just now finished, Our Declaration / A Reading of the DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE [sic] in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen (Harvard University). The significance of this error is that as it turns …
AUGUST 1, 2026 – Yesterday’s much needed cloud cover and most important . . . gentle, all-day rain . . . yielded to a return of bright, sun-filled weather this morning. I took my breakfast out to our back porch and reveled in the felicitous combination of honey-laced oatmeal (further enhanced with pecans, chopped walnuts, …
JULY 31, 2026 – When I returned home yesterday after a week’s absence, I noticed immediately the parching effect of the current drought. The lawn, front and back, was mostly yellow. Baked to a crisp, my lemon basil plant was beyond salvation, but Beth’s potted plants stood a fighting chance. I gave them a good …
JULY 29, 2026 – After dispensing with legal work—in which I experienced the satisfaction that accompanies “break-throughs”—I turned to my oft-mentioned project of late, construction of my model sailboat fleet. Most of today’s effort was devoted to intricate rigging, necessitating reliance on “cheaters,” pincer-nosed pliers and small-motor coordination. After hoisting main and jib on the …
JULY 22, 2026 – In the final scene of the 1970 movie, Tora! Tora! Tora!, after the successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, a sober Admiral Yamamoto turns to his elated staff aboard the flagship of the Japanese fleet and says, “I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him …
JULY 21, 2026 – One insidious feature of living in a big country, despite our hyper-connectivity, is that much of daily life can appear so disarmingly normal, even in the most abnormal times. A few days ago, you’ll recall, I wrote about how none of what we’re experiencing in the political and governmental arenas is …
JULY 20, 2026 – Earlier this month I wrote a review of The Oppermans. I’m now reading the book a second time. The redundancy is proving beneficial, both from the standpoint of grasping better the importance of certain details and from the perspective of meaning—that is, why a book such as this should be read …
JULY 19, 2026 – Often someone will ask if I’ve listened to Ezra Klein’s latest interview with so-and-so about such-and-such. And nearly as often, I’ll answer with the same shame-tinged reticence that a lazy student answers the teacher’s question, “Did you finish today’s assignment?” Seriously, I need to eschew all other consumption of information about …
JULY 16, 2026 – In the course of human events, what’s “normal”? The realistic but somewhat snarky response is “abnormality.” Plus, depending on what historical perspective is brought to the question, one must grapple with ever-changing standards to be applied to the analysis. Are we talking “cave day” values, the mores predominant in Persia in …
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 …