We had our breakfast in the hotel in Krakow the morning of May 4, 2000. We’d been together, the 40 of us**, since April 26, but this day was even more serious than most earlier days had been, and those days had been serious, too: Tabor, Terezin, Prague…. There was not much small talk this […]
Someone looking for me would not start at movie theaters: movies are an infrequent destination. Still, in the past seven days I viewed four films in four very different venues. Each of the films had (and have) diverse messages…beyond the films themselves. Last Sunday, the destination was The Minneapolis Film Festival showing of a documentary, […]
Tuesday, April 27, Goldman-Sachs testified at the U.S. Senate about their part in the mortgage meltdown. The media is awash with details about this. The long and short is that Goldman-Sachs defense appears to be that they did nothing wrong, they were simply following the rules of the game. They probably have a strong case. […]
Thursday I had the opportunity to drive author Paul Loeb from place to place in Minneapolis. Paul had spoken the previous evening on the new revision of his best-selling book “Soul of a Citizen”, and as authors do when their new works are published, he was making the rounds, and we had a few minutes […]
Last evening I was invited to one of the frequent “meet the candidate” events that represent a common and important part of the American political process. I parked on the street at the home where the event was to take place, and as it happened, at the same time I was walking up the driveway, […]
NOTE COMMENTS at end of this post. You don’t need to know me very well, or for very long, to know that I’ve never been a fan of golf. I once was told I swing a golf club like a baseball bat. It’s probably true. I’ve never had a lesson. So, why did I spend […]
Less than two months after the devastating January 12 earthquake, Haiti has become old news. Dr. Joia Mukherjee, native of Bengal and graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School, and for 11 of her 17 years as a physician part of Partners in Health, brought Haiti back in sharp focus before a large audience […]
Happy Easter. Some years ago I convinced my Uncle to loan me his collection of old postcards, sent to the rural North Dakota farm where he and my mother and many others grew up. The cards were mostly from the early 1900s, and in the end I scanned over 150 of them, and wrote a […]
Today is Census Day. A week ago today I had the privilege of listening to the Second and Fourth Graders at South St. Paul’s Lincoln Center Elementary present their music programs to their fellow students and people like me. These kinds of events are always highlights for me. On stage were two of my grandkids, […]
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Voltaire Earlier today, my spouse asked me what I thought of President Obamas just-announced approach to energy policy. His administration is apparently open to new, but limited, off-shore drilling for oil, including it in a package of other (in my reading) more important initiatives. This is a […]