Among my favorite souvenirs from more than 20 years of covering national politics for the New York Daily News are three odd rectangular cards: 2’’x 3” plastic sandwiches. Each was imbedded with electronics and I had to use the correct one each day at a turnstile to enter Chicago’s International Amphitheater near the stockyards and cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

      These entrance passes marked the first time such security measures ever were used at a convention—not surprising since all hell broke loose during a convulsive convention week in which, as a national commission later charged, Chicago’s finest engaged in a violent “police riot” against noisy, hairy, disruptive, largely unpleasant but also largely peaceful protestors.

      For a 21-year-old wet-behind-the-ears political journalist, it was almost literally a baptism of fire. . . .

I often have to update information at a medical appointment. The questionnaire sometimes asks about my hobbies. I usually answer: reading, running and walking, and yoga. But for the last seven years, caregiving for various family members, including the canine variety, has taken much of my time.

      I think that’s my hobby—or my vocation—in retirement. 

Like many partners, I’ve cared for my spouse—in my case, through two bouts of leukemia, a stroke and several surgeries. I’ve learned how to administer medication via a port, flush a line, clean a wound with saline, wrap it with Coban tape and check a medicine pack when it runs low on batteries.

      In other words, I know about things that I never wanted to know or never even knew existed. . . .

     Sometimes when I have a night at home alone, I time travel. My mode of travel is music.

      Sometimes I travel to the 1970s, sometimes the 1980s. I was born in 1961, so my music coming of age largely happened in the mid- to late 1970s. Over the years, I’ve sometimes felt cheated that I wasn’t older during the ‘60s to experience the Beatles, but I’ve made peace with that and have embraced the ‘70s and ‘80s as my decades—bad hair and clothes and all.

      To travel to the ‘70s, I select the “70s Rock Radio” station on my Pandora account. Within minutes, I’m back in middle school (America’s “Sister Golden Hair”) or high school (Kansas’s “Carry on Wayward Son”).

      Hearing the Commodores’ “Brick House” sends me to my high school cafeteria, . . .

      Do you have a bucket list? Are there specific places you wanna go, specific things you wanna do, before … well, you know?

      The term itself is actually fairly recent, with Merriam-Webster finding the first known use only in 2006. Since then, the term has been popularized by the 2007 movie The Bucket List, with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two terminally ill men who decide to list things they want to do before they die.

      It’s also been popularized, I think, by the growing number of people in our age group, folks in our sixties, seventies and eighties, who are thinking more and more about how much time they have left and what they haven’t already done before they kick the bucket. . . .

      I can’t say I’ve ever sat down to scribble out a “bucket list” per se. 

      Yet somewhere in my head is a jumble (jumbles increasingly are us) of things I’ve never managed to do that I would hope to do previous to, well, being dead—the bucket kicked, doing being done.

      I’ll begin by getting a couple of things straight: No jumping out of airplanes (like Bush senior). No climbing anything higher than Bear Mountain. No wild, drunken anythings.

      But travel—more travel!  But challenges! (Though not too challenging challenges.)

      I would, for example, “like to spend some time in Mozambique,” where, hear tell, “the sunny skies are aqua blue” . . . .

As the grandmother of three teenage girls, I have trepidation about their futures growing up in America. A hateful tenor toward women and anti-women rhetoric out in the open is now mainstreamed. Women’s rights are being pulverized by a male-dominated anti-female political movement. 

Jessica Calarco, author of “Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” writes, “Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs for women: programs like sick time, vacation time, health care, affordable day care and maternal leave.”

Women hold nearly 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs and they are struggling, ignored and often vilified in the political arena. Demeaning treatment and mean-spirited comments and policies against women have accelerated in this country.

I personally have experienced this. . . .

      Now that they’re over, I’m sensing that a lot of you have come around on the Olympics.

      There was a time when all I’d hear was: “too jingoistic,” “too commercial,” “made for TV.”

      I never bought that. I have not been to the World Series, the Super Bowl, the World Cup or any other of those high-priced, one-sport finals. But I did manage to obtain tickets to four Olympics: Montreal, Barcelona, Atlanta and Beijing. The first with friends, the rest with family, always with my wife, who is not otherwise a sports fan.

      I had the pleasure of bringing my mother and mother-in-law once each, my father-in-law twice. Our kids accompanied us three times.

      It invariably took a lot of finagling to secure the tickets. . . .

Donald Trump, as we have well learned by now, is a champion of a somewhat arcane epistemological theory. This theory holds that what is valid—what, as a logician might phrase it, is the case— is what the beholder would like to be the case.

      Then-President Trump wanted it to be true, for example, that he had triumphed in the 2020 presidential election, ergo he did win. And the fact that all the various officials and courts that examined the evidence involved did not see it that way meant the election was stolen from him.

      Recently the former president has been focused on crowd sizes. He wants, understandably, to have drawn the largest crowds. Indeed, that is a particular point of pride for him. Therefore, he has.

      And candidate Trump certainly does not want his crowd sizes to be diminishing due to the length, lack of focus and tediousness of his recent speeches. So, they aren’t. . . .

Dear Senator Vance,

I’m a childless cat lady and I’m actually happy! And, oh yes, I’m also a Democratic voter in the battleground state of North Carolina.

Nothing galls me more than Republican men judging my choices in life or worse, thinking that unmarried women do not have value and are miserable.

I’m an Emmy-winning television producer whose lifelong work has been to educate, inspire and advocate important issues. I’ve done that without a married partner. I had a lot of interesting and well-educated boyfriends along the way but none were marriage material for me or me for them. . . .

From the new “breaking” event to the women’s broad jump, the exuberance of the Paris Olympics has inspired me. The competition undoubtedly has been fierce, but it’s also been joyous, filled with fist bumps, high fives and hugs for teammates and competitors alike.

Snoop Dogg, torch carrier, personality and super fan, summed it up in an interview with NBC’s Mike Tirico Thursday night: “It’s about bringing the whole world together.”

I’ve loved the Olympics, particularly in summer, since I was a kid. That’s when I learned, in 1960, that 100-meter and 200-meter gold medalist Wilma Rudolph was one of 22 children and had overcome polio as a kid to become the world’s fastest woman.  That story left an imprint.

Today, in 2024, as well, the subtext of the games remains resilience . . .

Like many of us, I sometimes have a love-hate relationship with tech. And right now, I’m hating.

But I’m not a Luddite, really.

Like many of us, I marvel at the ability to zoom with someone on the other side of the world. I am pleasantly flabbergasted at being able to FaceTime from a Greek island and enthralled that I can listen to any music I want to listen to whenever I want to listen to it.

I am thrilled I can look up the name of the co-star of 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” when I can’t think of it and I’m really happy I can post photos of my beach trip that anyone can be jealous of and yes, I’m very grateful I can help create a blog where people can see what I write and I can read what others of my generation have to say. . . .

To exit the (former) horrendous political scene, so draining and hopeless, I finally got myself a ticket to Paris where I am encamped— leaning toward a computer and writing a new book.

My Dream

It's amazing how much better I feel, how productive I've become, how happy I am to greet the world each day. . . .

What's your dream?

Our double-wide bedroom clothing rack and shelves came crashing down with a bang last week.

Too many clothes and boxes above them proved too much weight and ripped the studs holding up the clothing rod right out of the wall. On Cape Cod, that means waiting until Fall when one of the overworked local handymen comes up for air.

Faced with a bed piled high with shirts, pants, old shoes, useless ties, belts and more, we quickly filled three big garbage bags with clothes we hadn’t worn in years, threw some out and took the rest to a local second-hand store. It certainly wasn’t the first time our possessions had gotten the better of us. . . .

A couple of weeks ago, right here on this brilliant website, I wrote about a sense of despair, a sense of being poked in the ribs by events again and again. That time now feels so long ago.

In those two weeks, the political world seems to not have just changed, but to have flipped upside down. Everything that had gone wrong now seems to be going right, and everything that had gone right for those lucky bastards on the other side seems, finally, to have begun cratering. . . .

Comics in the newspaper

Stickball in the street

Civil political disagreements

The Rand McNally Road Atlas . . .

And More Things We Don’t Miss

Hair curlers

Running out of film . . .

Click for more of each

Messages From The Past

The Case For Forgotten Pleasures

A Video

Click here for video

and for links to additional “idea videos”

by Mitchell Stephens

While watching the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, two things stuck out:

• It was raining in Paris, like I remember it always was.

• ·And the big opening number featured Lady Gaga, an American, and the big closing number featured Celine Dion, a Canadian.

When I lived in Paris, 45 (!) or so years ago, it was pretty much always raining. That first summer, in our immeuble de grand standing in the 7th arrondissement, we wore sweat pants and sweatshirts in July and August because it was so cold and damp. We were convinced that Parisians’ generally sour mood then—at least to Americans—was simply a reflection of their generally sour weather. We were convinced that Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to “April in Paris,” had never been east of the East River. . . .

Red-diaper baby. Does anyone under the age of 50 or who’s not in a left-wing corner of the universe know what a red-diaper baby is?

I didn’t know until I was in college. I told a friend about my grandfather’s response to the Taft-Hartley law, which required all labor union officers to sign an affidavit that they were not then and never had been a Communist Party member. As a Fur and Leather Workers Union officer, he decided to take early retirement in 1948 rather than join his friend, union president Ben Gold, in fighting the law. My friend informed me that a grandparent belonging to the U.S. Communist Party made me a red-diaper baby.

Recently I attended a salon of almost a dozen other red-diaper babies, all women. We had grown up in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s . . .

Maybe I need to be more chill.

That thought arrived, not for the first time, the other day.

I wasn’t thinking politics—about which I feel the need to be even more engaged. I was thinking about my day-to-day encounters with fellow humans.

I was in my car on 107th Street in Manhattan, just east of Broadway, when I underwent this particular revelation.

I had been driving slowly—not, mind you, just because I’m old. I was driving slowly mostly because I was, as I often am, looking for a parking spot . . .

      As a musician and recovering lawyer, I’m taking a dive into why I hardly play any songs younger than 35 years old.

      It’s not just that this old fart kinda stopped listening to pop music some years ago; it relates to the wonderfulness of the music of the ‘50s/’60s/’70s. I’d be the last to argue that that music was somehow superior to today’s. But its border-crossing had lasting effects.

      White kids started listening to R&B/soul, thanks in no small part to the legendary DJ Alan Freed. Before you knew it, that music was affecting the young genre called rock ‘n’ roll, in the U.S. and across the pond. (See, for example, some Liverpudlian band which thought it cute to use a punny name that linked music and insects.) . . .