As a bull facing certain death stubbornly raises its head one last time, kicks up dust and charges the Matador, so my Brooklyn-born father faced his own end; ninety-one years old, and he truly thought he’d never die. “Why is this happening to me?” he... Continue

“You are a very strange man.” My wife Norma is smiling at me and gently shaking her head. Her comment follows my latest effort at romance. “Inherent non-locality means that when we kiss the entire universe is involved,” is what I said. Admittedly, this does... Continue

Our granddaughter Isabelle loves to paint. She’ll be three years old in late February, and seems to have gravitated to making art. Unconstrained by matters of self-criticism, perfectionism, or rules of any kind, her work is completely expressive, uninhibited and spontaneous. Watching her playfulness reminds... Continue

I managed to catch a nasty chest cold circulating around town, found myself low on energy and sitting around for most of a week in no mood to work or even read, so I browsed Netflix and nostalgically began watching the first season of the... Continue

Our modern lives are very speedy, filled with constant activity and continuous stimulation - deadlines, commitments, obligations, forms of entertainment, trips to the store, picking up the kids from school, getting to and from work, doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, running errands and so... Continue

I don’t watch too many television shows, but I’m hooked on Mad Men. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, where my businessman father lived the Mad Men life alongside the other post war executives. A episode this season featured scenes in... Continue

A few months ago Wikileaks released hundreds of thousands of government documents about the Iraq war, some of which reveal that not only did the U.S. military look the other way as Iraqis tortured and murdered Iraqis, but actually turned Iraqis over to the Iraqi... Continue

Many of the most moving moments during the last weeks of my father’s life were experiences of hospice. In this age of modern medicine where every effort is used to successfully prolong life, hospice instead focuses patient comfort and dignity. Prolonging life, even when it... Continue

We study, analyze, organize, strategize, plan, anticipate, and calculate probabilities, but life constantly upends us. We enlist computers, algorithms, software programs, collected metrics, trend-spotting, forecast modeling and plain old intuition, yet fail to accurately predict much more than tomorrow’s weather. Despite insight, hindsight, or foresight... Continue