The gifts of time

I lived in New York for most of 1963, and one of my best friends was an actress, three years older than I, who had a major part in a major soap broadcast from New York. She was my cousin, and we had much the same background in South Carolina—conservative family and a...

Resolutions for 2013

C and I were in a bar Friday night. I talked to a friend about the difficulties of using an iPad or Nook or Kindle outside its own ecosystem—on an iPad, you need to read books from the Apple bookstore, and Amazon books from the Amazon bookstore on a Kindle, and so on....

Unresolved pain

There is a moment in Homeland, on Showtime Channel, when Damien Lewis, as Brody, sits at a table in a cell, supposedly in CIA headquarters, his feet chained to the floor, his hands chained to the table. Brody had been imprisoned for eight years in an Arabic country....