. . . At the moment the only life for whose existence we currently have actual evidence anywhere in the universe can be found in our local “biosphere,” which extends about five miles high and seven miles deep around the planet Earth.

       And this shallow and tiny—by cosmic standards—“biosphere” is indeed precarious. It could be smothered. It could get crushed. It could be fried. Indeed, one rogue asteroid could cause all the life we know of to die.

       Every once in a while, we catch a glimpse of the precariousness of life on earth. In the United States such glimpses are more common nowadays out West, and I won’t pretend that anything we are facing back East can compare to what happened in Los Angeles in January.

       But I experienced some of these forebodings a few days ago, when, not for the first time, a cloud of smoke from wildfires in faraway Canada drifted, our way—turning the sun orange and covering the New York area with an eerie, still shroud. . . .

      During this last month or so when it has been, give or take, a million degrees everywhere, twice we’ve been in homes without air conditioning. Both homes did have fans and both homes were in areas of the country that don’t usually get temperatures in the million-degree range, but of course these are different times. 

      And at both homes, I’ll readily admit, we were really, really warm.

      That is, we were no longer acclimated. Air conditioning has become such an integral part of our lives, so basic to the way we go about everything, that confronting a world without AC was a harsh reminder of the way things used to be. 

      Living in the South, as we do, had made air conditioning not just a godsend but essential. . . .

Seven excerpts from the post, “27 Notes On Growing Old(er),” from Ian Leslie’s Substack, The Ruffian.

1. Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.

2. Let me summarize the science of how aging affects physical and mental capability: All the lines on the graph point down.

      We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity—while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by. . . .

      In other cultures, Meredith Monk would be called shaman, seer, healer; here we struggle to define her interdisciplinary prowess. Singer/composer, dancer/choreographer, actor/performer, director/playwright, visual artist/filmmaker—even together, these categories cannot capture her resplendent achievements.

      She creates visceral excavations of abstracted gesture, sound and tableau, inviting audiences to experience archetypal, transformative rituals. Distilling idiosyncratic movement, three-octave vocalizing and luminous stage design to their unadorned essence, she collages these elements into transcultural dreamscapes.

      From large-scale, multivenue events with a hundred-plus performers, to intimate pieces for solo voice and wine glass . . .

My parents participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a protest that culminated in Lyndon Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act, 60 years ago on August 6.

*

In Alabama, as she and my father marched into Montgomery, my mother was pregnant, carrying twins.  It was a moment of heroism for them both, but it was also a moment of hope. In the shadow of the Alabama State Capitol, they heard Martin Luther King, Jr. intone those famous words, “How long? Not Long!”

That was March 1965. And “How long? Not long,” proved prophetic.  By August of that year, Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act. . . .

A two-and-a half-minute video featuring thoughts on the fiercest animals on Africa's savanna and what we can learn from them about brutality, kindness and humans, who, after all, originated there. Lots of original lion video, plus quotes from Einstein, Darwin, Leonardo, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Hannah Arendt, Wallace Stevens and Golda Meir.

click here for video

Another weekend day, another protest.

      This time it was called “Rage Against the Regime,” and although the name was different much was the same.

      There were the usual call-and-response chants: “Tell me what democracy looks like/this is what democracy looks like”; “A people united/can never be divided.”

 There were the usual signs, both commercially produced and handwritten, although this time there were a number of new ones that referenced the Epstein files and the current president’s relationship to the disgraced financier and trafficker (“Trump is a pedo.”)

      There were the usual speeches with the usual calls to action and there were the usual people in attendance. . . .

      I was having coffee with a college classmate in my hometown of Falmouth, Mass., last week when he told me he’d have to travel to Bogota, Colombia, to see his young grandchildren.

       “Why is that?” I asked.

      He told me his daughter-in-law, a Colombian native, is not a U.S. citizen like her husband and children. She is afraid to travel to the United States.

      A few days later, in my French conversation group, a friend told me a similar story.

      His son and family won’t visit Falmouth from Frankfort, Germany, this summer. His German daughter-in-law is not comfortable visiting the United States right now given the horror stories of how the Trump Administration is handling immigrants and international students.

      Perhaps you consider these women to be overly cautious.

      I don’t. . . .

     The just-concluded marathon road trip included visits with:

•       A friend we had first met in 1963;

•      A friend we had first met in 1965;

•       A friend we had first met in 1971;

•       Friends we had first met in 1982;

•       And our new friends, whom we had first met in 1991.

      These old friends are also, not surprisingly, all reasonably old now and part of the impetus of the trip, maybe an unspoken impetus, was the realization we didn’t know how many more times we’d be able to see these old friends. We’re at an age when continued contact is no longer a given, on either end. And we wanted to see these old friends before . . . well, you know. . . .

I started out intending to list the Top Ten, but I got carried away.

THE TOP TWENTY

1.    BACK IN MY ARMS AGAIN (THE SUPREMES);

2.    BADLANDS (BRUCE SPRINSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND);

3.    BORN TO BE WILD (STEPPENWOLF);

4.    BORN TO RUN (BRUCE SPRINSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND);

5.    BREATHLESS (THE CORRS);

6.    DEVIL WITH A BLUE DRESS (MITCH RYDER AND THE DETROIT WHEELS);

7.    GOOD LOVIN’ (THE RASCALS);

8.    GIMMEE SOME LOVING (THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP);

9.    HELP (THE BEATLES);

10. I’LL FEEL A WHOLE LOT BETTER (THE BYRDS); . . .

Click for the rest of THE TOP TWENTY, plus (many) Honorable Mentions

      This collection—from someone who straddles the Baby Boomer generation and Generation X—is by no means an “ultimate” playlist, but more of a backward glance at some meaningful moments in my life. These aren’t great rock songs, although I think some of them are quite good. Rather, these songs connect me to memories that make me smile. And we can all stand to smile more these days.

Close to You. The Carpenters. Hearing this song for the first time when I was nine years old kicked off a lifelong habit of mine—listening to music in the dark. I was at my first sleepover at a friend’s house. We were playing around on her family’s piano, and I left the living room to get a glass of water. When I came back, all the lights were off, and the living room was pitch dark. The Carpenters’ “Close to You” was playing on the stereo. I sat on the edge of the sofa and felt Karen Carpenter’s clear, beautiful voice envelop me.

The Ocean. Led Zeppelin. . . .

      The Americans with Disabilities Act passed 35 years ago this month and July was subsequently named Disability Pride Month. The landmark legislation promised more than it delivered, and now we are even backsliding on what progress has been made.

      Twenty-nine years ago, I became paraplegic from spinal surgery gone very wrong. Immediately, I found myself advocating for myself and others in an oblivious ableist world. The most frustrating time was serving two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives (2019–2022). Unbeknownst to me, state governments were immune from the ADA.

      My very first day being seated was complicated. Tradition dictated new legislators’ names were called and then could find any available seat. I told the Speaker’s office this would be problematic; I needed an aisle seat since I used a cane. She agreed, but other legislators grumbled I had ruined their tradition. . . .

      We knew it would be bad, very bad. It turns out it’s been worse, much worse.

      We had read about Project 2025 and we had remembered the first term, the botched Covid response, the vengeful actions, the comic buffoonery and the ridiculous incompetence. But now, almost exactly half way through Trump’s first year—just one-eighth of his term—our worst fears already have been greatly exceeded. There’s so much we couldn’t possibly have imagined. It has been so much worse.

      We could not have imagined that masked, often unidentified, men, working for our government, would snatch unsuspecting college students off the streets..

      Or that those masked, unidentified men would grab children going to school or grab mothers out of cars, leaving their children alone. . . .

Tom Lehrer, one of the most significant social satirists of our generation, died over the past weekend at the age of 97.

  Born in New York City, Lehrer started writing clever and acerbic songs when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the mid-1940s. He kept up his songwriting avocation while doing graduate work at both Harvard and Columbia (yet never completed a Ph.D.). He wrote enough material to record a dozen songs in 1953, which he released on his own label as a 10-inch LP. He followed that six years later with another self-released album of 11 songs.

The humor in Lehrer’s songs from the 1950s came in three basic types. First there were his hilariously macabre ditties – sort of the musical counterparts to Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson cartoons. These were on the order of the self-explanatory “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” the endorsement of cannibalism espoused in “The Irish Ballad” and the all-too-literal “I Hold Your Hand In Mine” and “The Masochism Tango” . . .

      The latest casualty of Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism is Eduardo Porter, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent critics of this heinous regime.

      [Last week], Porter wrote his last column for the Washington Post. In it, he criticized Trump’s attempt to dismantle the global trading system.

      Porter didn’t stop there. He also explained why he was leaving the Post:

      “Jeff Bezos and his new head of Opinion are taking the paper down a path I cannot follow.” . . .

(An excerpt from the Substack of Robert Reich, a university professor and former Secretary of Labor. More of Reich’s opinions, in particular about baby boomers, are in this week’s edition of The New York Times Interview.)

      We’re going to the municipal swimming pool in Rosendale, NY. I put on my swimsuit and slip into my thongs. No, not that kind of thong—the skimpy, sexy strip of material designed, barely, to cover what needs to be covered.

      No, I’m talking about the rubbery, pliable cheap sandals for our feet that we always, while growing up in New York, called thongs, for whatever reason. And that now, permanently ensconced outside New York, we generally call flip-flops.

      The thought occurred to query our friend Alice: “What do you call these,” I asked as I showed her my footwear, “thongs or flip-flops?”

      “Those are Zorries,” said Alice, who has spent time in the South Pacific. “That’s what everyone calls them out West.” . . .

"When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything" — Donald J. Trump

      Renewed scrutiny of Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein reminds us of just how Trump’s strategy with women—assaulting them without permission, on the assumption that legal accountability was unlikely—mirrors his strategy for governing. Grab ‘em by the institutions.

      And Trump has been mostly proven right, because the Supreme Court seems to be willing to let him do anything, to exempt him from the laws that prior Presidents had to follow.

      A couple of months ago, the major concern was what would happen when Trump defied the courts. A more complicated picture is now emerging. One that mixes quiet but unmistakable defiance of court decisions by the Trump administration with encouragement from the six Republican-appointed Justices who sit atop the judicial branch. This is an arguably worse scenario . . .

(An excerpt from the Substack of Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.)

      It is a dilemma for art history when collected objects and artifacts are what remains of an artist’s legacy. The iconoclastic work of David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), a prolific artist/activist who produced photographs, graffiti, paintings, sculptures, performances, music, videos and essays ranting against governmental, medical and societal stigmatization is on view at the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT, through November. 

      As an artist, he came of age in New York’s ’80s East Village gallery scene, alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But he always remained an outsider. His art was highly political, angry and belligerent: his aggressive stance reflecting the harshness of his adolescence on the streets of Manhattan which included drugs and prostitution. He also lived with AIDS. His work was often in the crossfires of the culture wars before his untimely death in 1992. . . .

David Wojnarowicz, 10 May – 30 November 2025, Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation. Photo: Jeffrey Nintzel

      Ten of my faves (note I wrote "of my" vs. "my"— tunes I might have unintentionally left out might kill me otherwise):

·       “My One and Only Love,” John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Fell in love with it when it got played at a cousin's wedding a number of years ago. Trane's intro, which walks through the whole melody, is nonpareil.

·       The Band's cover of Dylan's “I Shall Be Released,” featuring Richard Manuel's haunting lead vocals.

·       Speaking of Zimmerman, I'd be remiss if I didn't include at least one of his as done by him. Let's go, somewhat arbitrarily, with “When the Ship Comes In.” Hard to beat, both melody-wise and lyrics-wise. …

·       “Oogum Boogum,” Brenton Wood. Unbeatable melody & delivery. . . .

PART OF A SERIES ON FAVORITE SONGS. FOR A PREVIOUS LIST, SEE HERE, HERE OR HERE.

      Let me admit it right at the top:

      I’m envious of the friend who’s been traveling all over the world, lazing on remote beaches, gallivanting with giraffes, walking the streets of an ancient capital, dining with high-level wines.

      I’m envious of the friend who has still another new book coming out this year, still another likely bestseller.

      I’m envious of the friend swimming in adorable grandchildren.

      I’m envious of the friend who sleeps effortlessly through the night.

      I’m envious of another friend who sleeps effortlessly through long airplane flights.

      I’m envious of the friend who still sees perfectly well at an advanced age — and has never needed to wear glasses.

      I’m envious of those who don’t feel envy, because envy is not a particularly honorable emotion to feel. …