Just as I was about to begin enjoying this beautiful autumn Sunday in New York, my in-box slapped me with an outrage I thought I’d left behind in the summer of 2020. The Week in Ideas newsletter I’d received from the Washington Post informed me of a piece its media…

Otto was the quintessential 1950s charismatic juvenile delinquent. A combination of Elvis Presley, James Dean and the coolest member of the Jets in West Side Story, he was like the big bother I never had, and he lived right next door. Otto’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Klotz, had fled Germany…

When I got a summer job at the factory where my father worked after my junior year of high school, one of his co-workers told me my dad had “nervous nerves.” That was on one of the days when I came in to work, but my father stayed home on…

Over our many years of traveling together, my wife and I have become, well, a bit spoiled when it comes to our tastes in hotels. After treating ourselves to a couple of luxury stays at places like the Kempinski on the Costa del Sol in Southern Spain and the Santa…

Every time I read another news report or opinion piece about the Great Resignation — and that’s a lot of times — I find myself thinking about my own career and what I would have lost had I quit or jumped jobs on the occasions I felt frustrated or undervalued…

My History of Highlighting: Following the Fluorescent Yellow Path to the Heart of Reading… and Writing Highlighting text in bright yellow has been a habit of mine for as long as I can remember. When I tried to think back to when I first started, I came up empty. So I did a little digging and found out that the highlighter was invented in 1962 by…

When I began getting serious with my Chinese girlfriend, my Jewish mother cautioned me that I was not as big a countercultural renegade as I liked to imagine. …

Hi readers. That was my attempt at a click-bait headline. Whadaya think? — I bet if my name was Emily Ratajkowski, this post would’ve gone mega-viral already. Heck, the super-sexy supermodel’s new book, My Body, was an instant New York Times best-seller. Is anyone surprised? Being born a beautiful female, as we all know, is the most potent form of privilege. You won’t…

A CNN newsflash across my iPhone screen on Saturday announced that Michael Lang, who was a driving force behind the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair that turned the summer of 1969 into a life-changing experience for me and many in my generation, had died at 77. When I turned to…