Home

On the ride home from the airport, Mom and I stop at the Farmer's Market. It's 98 out but the booths have a steady fill of people who are all slightly uncomfortable talking to the farmers. We sample cheese...

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Sunday

I could likely devote an entire website to the subject of Sundays. I ran four miles, down the Westside Highway to Battery Park where a lot of Europeans and Asians were shuttling between Ground Zero and the ferry to the...

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Spring...

it makes everything seem possible. This all came from one day, last Monday, which was the first day of spring. First the aliens landed: On the subway uptown I turned the tables on a sketcher: I ran around the reservoir...

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A Month-Old Sentence

We hit it off, I am saying things I don’t say, not psychopathic or dirty things but rather, honest things, strange and vulnerable things and we are sharing drinks that are spilling out from being overpoured, but we are liking...

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Someone Great

(Inspired by an LCD Soundsystem song of the same name and Laphroaig single malt scotch whisky) I am away from something I know, but its essence envelops me on cold meanders down 14th street toward the river in the winter....

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Review of Sorts: Radiohead (In Rainbows)

You must be in a very strange place when you listen to a new Radiohead new album. I mean a very strange place in the physical sense, a locality which is not common to you, not a foreign emotional...

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First of September

On the border, there are jackals, bearing down with their eyes, less like predators, and more as olive presses do. I say Tolstoy, like my dying word, on the very day they named his city Petrograd. You pick the other...

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The First Twenty-Four (Hours)

I woke in a panic as I had missed free breakfast at the hotel and had overslept to counterbalance the difference between my intended and actual bedtimes. I was due uptown (which is a totally inaccurate but wholly-of-habit term) in...

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Tocqueville in Birmingham

Baseball in America is alive and well in Alabama. Or maybe America in baseball is alive and well in Alabama, where outside of Birmingham, our national pastime still thrills, if only as sideshow to a more salient national pastime,...

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Behind All This...

He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war... -Foreword to a Yehuda Amichai anthology. #4 of Amichai's Seven Laments for the War-Dead 4 I came upon an old zoology textbook, Brehm,...

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Oh My God Whatever Etc.

Saturday we were talking about getting old and it's funny because we're not but these conversations are the conversations had until it's finally true. Saturday's idee fixe (and the idee fixe of most Saturdays) on aging came out of spending...

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Summertime

As I wade through the work and myriad chores that precede my next great adventure, I thought to show this minor homage to summer. We're almost to a full year of Trust Fund Reporting. Thank you for keeping me...

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'Merica

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The Dream Game

Baseball is not what it used to be. While dive bars and stadium stands are still (mostly) full of fans, stalking their teams with the requisite fanaticism, there is a lump in the collective throat of the baseball electorate...

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Sonnet

Solstice Dusk was counterveiled by the rivulets and burnishes amid the comedy of the park. We met on the longest day and we had no letters on or need to request its cessation. I stayed on your pillows beset by...

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Excerpt

...We moved to the inevitable banalities of small talk; the birthday plans we'd miss, the future we’d share as the friends we never were; and of course, the nascent hurt and missteps bygone and beyond unknotting. Our textbook and singular...

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007)

Though I realize that the world does not (Thanks Michael) need any more obsequious Kilgore Trout tributes... From A Man Without A Country: "I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science-fiction...

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Something Telling...

These are the kinds of e-mails that my mother forwards to me. Two astronauts land on Mars. Their mission: to check whether there is oxygen on the planet. "Give me the box of matches" says one. "Either it burns and...

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Nostalgia

Here is something wonderful. I spent the end of last week with a visiting Hassan who came to New York on his way to the Bahamas. I know, it's a tough life for a Harvard student. In the aftermath...

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Jeffrey Goldberg...oh and the Prime Minister

At the General Assembly, which I neglected to finish writing about because I am all Jewed out right now, I went to a forum which featured Michael Parks, the former Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Times, a spokeswoman from...

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Karnit Goldwasser Speaks

As Karnit Goldwasser, the wife of kidnapped Israeli soldier Ehud Goldwasser, quietly appeared at the podium at the 75th annual General Assembly, her words almost became a nonessential addition to a profound experience. Strikingly composed, she took a moment to...

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March 16

Hemingway On a walk in Jaffa, I watched the port close for Shabbat and the sunset on the sea from a pier where Arab fisherman stood with their poles and bags of bread in anticipation of their dinner. Some...

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March 15

A drive through the West Bank on the ides of March was less eventful than my thrill-seeking mind had subversively hoped for. A tire burned outside Jericho in protest of an Israeli raid that followed a Palestinian attack on Red...

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Purim - 100 Words

March 12, 2006 In Israel, Purim is celebrated in walled cities exactly one day later than the rest of the country. The logic of why always escapes me. Some interpretation of some text from sometime, much time before now....

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Going Retro...

While I was in Israel before summer (circa March 2006), I was participating in a project for www.100words.net, a site where you write an entry totaling 100 words each day for a month. Logical enough... As I was recently looked...

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I'm wondering who won the war...

...It's a small cobwebbed building that inspires a modest patriotism; you sit in this small room probably the size of the Oval Office (except it's rectangular) and wonder how people, so few people, would decide to be heroic enough to to actually sign a document that the world endorsed but their neighbors would never accept. You wonder why they keep signing documents that all its neighbors will never accept. Is the heroism in having that faith?

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Guest Column (Amelia)

“Only I Get To Pick On My Little Brother” by Amelia Chandler-Lewy All armies are the same Publicity is fame Artillery makes the same old noise Valor is an attribute of boys Old soldiers all have tired eyes All soldiers...

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The Classiest Bomb Shelter Packing List...Ever

Basics 2 - Large bottled water (liter size) 1 - Liter cola (they do exist) 1 - Blunt object with which I may remove the top of an empty liter bottle (in case...you know) 2 - Cans of Kosher tuna...

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The First Night – Kikar Rabin

... At the site where Rabin was shot, I anticipate a crowd to be there (considering the day’s unsteadiness, Nasrallah’s threats to strike Tel Aviv), people appealing for a sense of strength induced by a scene like Memphis might have been for Americans in the late 1960s.

No one is at the Rabin memorial so I walk around the corner to the square where the peace rally took place before Rabin was assassinated. ...

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