Category: In the news
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Guilty holiday pleasures
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Holiday madness and excess already getting to you? It may be time to shut off the phone, lock the door and indulge in some guilty pleasure time. What’s your guilty holiday pleasure? Do you secretly binge on Hallmark movies? Stash and eat festive chocolates? Lock yourself into the bathroom for…
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75 years of “funny pictures”
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“Charles M. Schulz was an innovative genius, creating a fantasy world that connected to kids as well as adults and all based on powerful iconic characters who express deep feelings of loneliness and resentment and despair. The feeling that everything is against us. The craving for love. An enormous earnestness…
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The Spectre of Book Banning
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I remember watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show on television when I was younger and thinking how silly it was to show Rob and Laura Petrie sleeping in twin beds. Clearly they’d had sex in order to have their son Ritchie, but the show was produced while the…
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The world is getting stranger
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Writers and other artists are not happy with the advent of AI. Not because we’re seriously worried about losing our jobs, but because we feel that nothing can or should replace the inspiration and heart of a human touch. So you can imagine the reaction when the organizers of the…
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To borrow someone else’s tears
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When my hubby and I planned a visit to New Orleans a few years ago, a few people we knew asked if we’d be doing the ‘Katrina’ tour through the worst-hit parts of the city, i.e. the 9th ward. We don’t do “disaster tourism”. And by that I mean touring…
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A victory in the freedom-to-read war
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As an author, the news I’ve been watching most regularly from the U.S. is the coverage of book banning in schools and libraries. It may not seem to be the most important topic amid all the chaos around the world, but it’s a powerful symptom of the degradation of freedom,…