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After years of its waiting quietly, patiently on my bookshelf, gathering dust, finally today I picked up Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. I do enjoy it because when I read it aloud to the dogs (as one does) I get to say many locations and names of people in French and I find this very …
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I mentioned the Black Death to a small handful of people during this contemporary plague we’re experiencing—which isn’t much variation from the 15 years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those who know me best understand I’ve lived my adult life *desperately* waiting for opportunities to discuss the Black Death (and the Wars of the Roses and …
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A random tourist turned to me today, asking, “Where are we?” Thus started the most satisfying encounter of my entire trip.
I blinked. “We’re at the Largo di Torre Argentina.”
I love how this ancient, sacred place is randomly in the middle of a busy Roman piazza filled with modern life (and lots of cats, …
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I was watching a documentary on the princes in the tower where Tony Robinson claimed that Richard III might have been right to dispute Edward IV’s legitimacy because of this reason and that reason.
He said that if it was true that Edward was illegitimate, Richard III was the last legitimate monarch of England as …
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I am too negligent a piano player to ever acquire advanced skills, so I am forever and always at a solidly intermediate stage. Anyone listening would rate it roughly at the level of “tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me”.
That said, I have an immense passion for piano and take a …
Currently on a bus down a street in Jerusalem called David HaMelech (King David).
I will never get tired of streets named after Jewish ancestors, Jewish writers, Jewish historical moments.
Driving with Ram a month ago, we came across a street that translated to something like ‘Expelled from Spain.’ (All the Jews were expelled from …
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Today is my last Fourth of July in the United States of America for a long time.
I love this day.
This concept that governments are here to give us the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—with our consent—and that they lose this consent if the government deviates from its …