We just got back from Charleston, and while it is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited, I also believe its heaviness does not exclusively derive from the pressure of Low Country humid air.

Even by the water with the Atlantic breeze blowing, the weight of what Charleston was and in some ways, still is, gathers upon your head and shoulders, bowing them down, making it hard to breathe.

Around every corner, shadows gather and fall across the old city walls and cobblestones.

They spread so long they darken the face of the bright noonday sun.

No sooner…

Should it take 3 hours to cancel HBOMax from your XFinity (Comcast) service and fail in your mission to add channels for a modest additional cost?

I say “no” but Xfinity (Comcast) has other ideas.

We don’t have many choices in internet living in Southwest Florida: the choice basically is Xfinity (Comcast). Because I work online, I need reliable and reasonably fast internet and as part of that, usually you get “TV” or streaming video. Right?

One of my spiritual children mentioned the other day that she identified as “she/her” but was no longer certain what that really meant. She calls me Xena so there’s that. Being a real woman in our times means being willing and able to whale on anyone to defend your life and family. I know a lot of people don’t believe or understand that, but take it from Xena — yes it does.

In 2004, I began a story about a couple featuring my all-purpose guy, Gary the ergonomic architect, and his wife, a short-sighted, bossy shrew loosely based on awful…

One of my earliest memories is sitting in a doctor’s office on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles and hearing the radio announce that Robert Kennedy had been shot and had died. I remember asking, “Can’t the doctors put him back together again?”

The doctor came out into the waiting room and said, “No honey, we can’t.”

I was just a baby when Bobby’s brother Jack, the most charismatic and loved U.S. President of my lifetime, was gunned down in Dallas. Although I was too young to remember the real horror, I feared visiting Dallas as an adult. Driving through Dealey…

I was thinking about history, and of course what we know to be “true” may not be true at all. But let’s take what we think is true about the French Revolution. King Louis and Marie Antoinette were partying and leading their lives of luxury right up until the day they were seized at Versailles and transported to the Tuileries, where their situation deteriorated until both, along with an estimated 17,000 others, lost their heads to the Revolution.

Our culture blames Marie Antoinette for all of it, as she is the one, when told the French people lacked bread to…

I get the New York Times newsletter every morning. One day I’m told I’m a vicious, anti-social killer because I failed to double-mask and self-isolate for six months, and … According to NYT last week, after eighteen months of self-isolation in my closet and simultaneous volunteering for and maxing out my donations to Biden-Harris, I can hug family members again. As long as I’m vaccinated and so are they. Twice. By the way COVID is over get back to work.

Nearly all of the bad things in the world arise from a sense of fear. Fear shuts down conversations, closes off friendships, fuels bullying and drives almost 100% of U.S. business, work, society, education, and yes — foreign policy (as heinous as it is). The policy of leadership in any of these environments is “terrorize first lest ye be terrorized.” Elites pride themselves on learning and executing various time-honored (harassment, bullying, silencing, isolating) and emerging (algorithms, invitation-only platforms, limited access) ways to shut others out, put them down, and dominate them.

Thing is: it’s not about “them”. It’s about you.

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I was an independent student on full four-year scholarships during my undergraduate years at Scripps College, an “elite” liberal arts college for women in Claremont, CA. This college is one of the five Claremont Colleges, a high-priced group of schools theoretically based on Oxford’s college system. Scripps is often noted as one of the most physically beautiful campuses in the U.S.

I was sexually preyed upon by a Scripps faculty member (now deceased) and I was raped by one of his friends, who at the time, was the chair of Pomona College’s literature department. This man, too, is now deceased.

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