I never pledged a fraternity, and, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.  Don’t get me wrong: it was tempting in those first weeks of my freshman year at the small liberal arts college I attended.  The campus was abuzz with fraternity life when I arrived, and all of us newbies were getting “dates” to attend […]

There was a time in the not-so-distant past of the nation’s history when matters of foreign policy were deemed beyond partisanship.  Presidents were accorded the constitutional prerogatives to negotiate treaties and otherwise engage in diplomatic endeavors without fear of the kind of back-biting and game-playing that was all too common in domestic affairs. The thinking […]

If Gina Gionfriddo’s “Rapture, Blister, Burn” is a feminist play, it certainly isn’t one that Betty Friedan would endorse.  The play, which was considered for a Pulitzer Prize when it debuted in 2012, seems more a refutation of Ms. Friedan’s views than an endorsement of them.  Instead, Phyllis Schlafly, hardly a proponent of the women’s […]

A funny thing happened over the last weekend.  It suddenly was still light at 7:00.  Just a day before, darkness had descended on my part of the world (here in Sacramento, CA) by that hour, but then, suddenly last Sunday, as I walked from my office to my car at around 7, I did so […]