Featured

The March of Kindle

Posted on 26 July 2010

The recent announcement that sales volume on Kindle has just exceeded the sales of hardcover books on Amazon comes as no surprise to me. It simply shows that dedicated readers see the value of reading content on screens that are exclusive to that content with no other distractions. I’m sure there is a price point issue as well but it means that dedicated readers are quite comfortable reading on screens.
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Politics

Guilty As Charged

Posted on 18 July 2010

Peggy Noonan, who writes an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal has taken me to task in her recent column in the Wall Street Journal (July 16.) The title is “Youth Has Outlived Its Usefulness.” She nailed me right in the gut.

I’m not talking about my present “me” but my “me” of more than half a century ago when I was writing a column entitled “Pepper on the Side” for a weekly newspaper in Long Island of which I was the editor.

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Literature

Reading Beyond the First Paragraph

Posted on 09 July 2010

I think it was Will Rogers, the homespun comedian, columnist and actor, who is probably unknown to most people under seventy, who once said something like “If a pipe was attached to congress you would have enough hot air to heat every home in America.”

If you attached a pipe to the Internet, by that measure you would have enough hot air to heat the entire earth under a suffocating cloud that would make the direst predictions of global warming a mere glowing ash in a spent bonfire.

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Media

The Russian Affliction

Posted on 05 July 2010

The revelations about the Russian spy network in the United States has confirmed a long held theory of mine about the principal reason why the Russians lost the Cold War.

They’re paranoid. It’s in their DNA.

This is why they built their railroads with a wider span, which meant that the trains had to be raised when crossing borders to replace the undercarriage to enter foreign space. Continue Reading

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Literature

The Joy of Reading

Posted on 23 June 2010

It has become the prevailing opinion that people are not reading books with the same zeal, energy and enthusiasm as in bygone years. They could be right, although I cannot understand how people can live a rich, wise and fruitful life without reading works of the imagination. My own life would be bereft without my dedication to reading. Books have been my life, both as a writer and a reader. I am well aware that younger generations seemed to have eschewed reading, surrendering instead to the lure of other distractions, of which there are many. I’m not sure this is true and I do not explore statistical analysis to prove the point. Continue Reading

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Politics

Helen Thomas and the Jews

Posted on 13 June 2010

If a world-wide survey were taken as to the accuracy and relevance of Helen Thomas’s remarks about sending the Jews of Israel back to Poland and Germany “where they came from", my guess is that there would be a lot more people who agree with her than disagree. Continue Reading

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Politics

Anti-Semitism Erupts

Posted on 02 June 2010

For the eight odd million Jews scattered over the planet and not living in Israel, events concerning Israel cannot be dismissed as if they were occurring in someone else’s back yard. Continue Reading

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