I have long subscribed to — and attempted to live up to — the idea that the goal of journalism is to lend comfort to those in need, and to make uncomfortable those comforted by greed. Seven non-negotiables As a journalist long past his prime, I continue to hold these non-negotiable tenets…

Put the End-of-Times on hold Over the years, most of my readers on Medium, Quora, and my blogs have been patient with me when I tear off on a rant about the coming End Times or somesuch Cassandra-esque prophesy. My dour visions — unlike those of the fickle (just ask…

Ghosting the News In an upcoming Washington Post Perspective column, Post opinion writer Margaret Sullivan takes a heartfelt and hard-to-turn-away-from piece about the decline in community newspapers over the past few decades. In the article — “What America’s local news crisis means for our democracy.” …

Forget the Arrow of Time and the Grandfather Paradox If I had a time machine, I’d head back in time to Southern California, arriving on February 20, 1944, at Burbank airport near of Los Angles, where a young Army Air Force pilot in the newly-minted 436th Fighter Squadron, is about to give a pretty girl a ride in a…

Grief as a dead-end or as a guide forward One of the things I learned early on as a photographer and as an artist, is the importance of applying the creative instinct when things in life go south and grief threatens to settle in. There is absolutely nothing wrong with grief — it is a fundamental ,part of human…

Boomers are leaving behind a mess; our kids and theirs are left to clean it up, if they can. The Boomer mill wheel, 70 years in the making, is crushing the future This essay continues a familiar drumbeat to those who have followed my various social media postings over the past few years. For more than a decade I have felt like Cassandra among the disbelievers, the deniers, the hopeless optimists who don’t want to face the reality that the mill wheel…

Fear and loathing in the Lone Star State Texas, Texas, Texas. What a failure of a state you have become. More specifically, what a failure of government you have elected and continue to enable. Your Republican legislators and chief executive, along with other power-besotted knuckle-draggers from Florida to the Dakotas are lined up with their backs against the…

A culture of accountability can be ours if we want it A spat over a Cat (the one in the Hat) My generation didn’t see this coming, but we can learn from it Writing in the Sunday, May 16 edition of The Washington Post, reporter Valerie Strauss reopens a discussion she had with Philip Nel, author of the 2017 book, “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s…

Could my mother’s death resurrect something that had died in me? — May 3, 1997 Walking the tightrope between here and the hereafter Hummingbirds are hovering at their feeder, tiny pulsating out-of-focus splashes of blue-green iridescence shimmering just inches away just outside the bedroom window. Beyond the window, past the hummingbirds, past the garden of emerging flowers edging the neatly trimmed lawn, beyond our small lake surrounded by willows and sycamores, the Virginia…