The Moses family.

I’m collecting ideas for a d’var Torah — a talk about the Torah/Bible portion for July 11. The portion is Pinchas – Numbers 25:10-30:1  This is a busy portion, with a lot of events and information to choose from.
One thing that strikes me is that this is the place where Moses’s parents are given names [...]

Failure is an orphan quote.

Orphan quotes are quotation marks that people habitually use to surround a word or sometimes two. More recently they’ve broken out of the written sphere, becoming air quotes.

How much for that memory?

$60
That’s how much a memory costs at Liberty High School, outside Dallas. Well, a package of memories. Pictures and words on paper and bound between two hard covers.
A yearbook. And last week, an article by Jessica Meyers in the Dallas Morning News pointed to the yearbook as another victim of the decline of print.  It [...]

Imagine all the people / Reading all the words.

I’ve heard the story before. I know how it ends. Yet something — curiosity, desire to learn, duty — drew me to the recent biography of John Lennon, John Lennon, by Philip Norman.
I’d already ingested Bob Spitz’s manic, intense, addictive The Beatles. Norman, who’s written on the Beatles and the Stones, Elton John and Buddy [...]

The Elements of Snide

Every so often I’ll pick up a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in a book store and decide to buy it.  It’s the book, after all, on writing well, and if I’m a writer I shouldn’t let myself get caught with my quills down by displaying some shortcoming in my middling [...]

I didn’t recognize you standing up.

Hank Rosenfeld spent the better part of six years interviewing Irving Brecher, one of the last of the old Hollywood writers.
The result of their escapades is the as-told-to memoir “The Wicked Wit of the West” (a nickname Groucho Marx gave Brecher). Brecher died last November at 94, two months before the book was [...]