“I couldn’t help but think of you.” That was the subject line of an email from an old friend of mine — a fellow American expat who worked with me both in the U.S., as well as in Switzerland when our pharma company sent us on assignments there in the…

You be the judge. Who explains it better — the robot or the trained human journalist? — Tony Bennett, who died this week at 96, spanned my parents’ generation and my own. As Time magazine reported, he sang duets with Judy Garland and Lady Gaga. And he had almost half a million followers on Instagram. When I read his obituary in The New York Times, I was…

I like to look. And listen. The combination of sight and sound map the course of my curiosity as I wander the city. The French poet Charles Baudelaire came up with a name for the ever-observant street rambler: he called such a person a “flaneur.” The great Makhail Baryshnikov, answering…

At 81, Graham Nash is 10 years older than me. In 1962, when he was 21 and starting The Hollies, I was 11 and starting 6th grade. My family had just moved from the little chicken farm in rural central New Jersey where I was born to the teeming Philadelphia…

I write in the shower,

A little while ago I wrote a piece about a conversation I overheard at a Manhattan restaurant between a couple of septuagenarian doctors with personal reflections on the medical care of Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. At the end I paraphrased Yogi Berra’s famous saying that “You can observe a…

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote 25,000 years ago in “The Art of War.” …

A pretty Chinese girl with her Chinese mom in tow We glanced at one another and it changed the status quo Our lives seem not to happen as we plan or we expect Sometimes you just accept life out of faith and due respect Things pan out picture perfect like…

A couple of stories back I posted a piece called “The Boy Who Loved Pretty Women: Was He Born That Way, or Brainwashed by a Sexist, Patriarchal Society?” …