
2005
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Soonamee
Krakatoa, East of Java. Petey had a cure for tidal waves. Peanut butter. Put enough peanut butter in the “fizzues,”…
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Wave
When America could talk: George C. Marshall beside Harry Truman in 1948. There’s a tell-tale comment contained in news agency…
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Nolan Carl
When America could talk: George C. Marshall beside Harry Truman in 1948. Nolan Carl’s call came the night Jerry Brown…
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Saturn
Once in many lifetimes. Three old friends reappear thanks to email. One is now in a wheelchair. In the photo…
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Kissing
When the dirty laundry comes round. Here’s how we get around to kissing. We’re at a conference on torture. The…
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My mother’s name
Gisella’s Waschmacher’s family photographed on a Baltic beach in the summer of 1939; she is on the far right. Ididn’t…
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“Se ne fa un altro…”
Pope Paul VI elevating Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II, to cardinal, and with a young Donald Rumsfeld in…
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Dancing
Mercy? Really? I remain viscerally suspicious of Italian doctors. I pay little attention to degrees, whether from Kansas or Cambridge.…
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Halter
Betty Grable Istruggle with female undergarments. I read male novelists possessed with an uncanny knack for the details of apparel,…
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Take a River
Maybe a movie… “What do you think you know about me?” She’s doing it again, tilting her chin. Gestures are poignant in…
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Loro’s’ the Word
Making things up from whole cloth. Journalist Giuliana Sgrena thinks someone may have been out to kill her. Typical. The…
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The sassaraffer
Percy Winner in 1947. My father loved words. He dug through the dim cleavage of old dictionaries for clues and…
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Defibrillator
Let me own you… Because every moment counts, I want to own a HeartStart Home Automated External Defibrillator. No, I…
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Old is Good
Pope John XXIII was in his late 70s when elected in 1958. Much will be written in the coming days…
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Disobeying Funerals
The triumph of unbridled narcissism. From time to time I revisit “Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s remarkable propagandistic peon…

Essays
A collection of writings spanning 2004 to 2025, originally published in The American Magazine.











