Author Archives: jsl915@aol.com

No, I won’t write it up as a pastiche of Proust, or of Proust by way of Nabokov. I’ve already done that, because Professor Aciman asked us to submit our own little one-page exercises in Proustian homage. And so we … Continue reading →

Between the Saturday Night Live cold open last weekend and Rep. Ocacio-Cortez’s refusal to play defensive. . .

I walked by the mansion in which Nabokov grew up in St. Petersburg nearly every day over a five-week stay in 2005. I hadn’t yet read Speak, Memory however. I love this passage, re: the family’s doorman, a certain Ustin: … Continue reading →

The mother of a young man who died rationing his insulin now presents his ashes to the offices of Big Pharma. Mike Ludwig at Truhout reports. It is Big Pharma and the health insurance companies that are the real death … Continue reading →

Forget hundreds of millions – We now learn that it’s as much as three billion of our taxpayer funds  that Cuomo and de Blasio are giving away to Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.

Today’s story in the Times will tell you exactly how unfit. The idea that Hillary would have even considered Sandberg for Treasury Secretary is a testament to how close in ideology–not, of course, interactive and behavioral fitness–Hillary and the Donald … Continue reading →

Let me get this straight: Governor Cuomo is giving hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to the world’s richest man. And Mayor de Blasio comes in on cue with an unqualified,  Orwellian endorsement. And they want to hike the … Continue reading →

Sarah Bernhardt, James Agate wrote soon after she died in 1923, “had a hundred different ways of being the same person.”

On the Hungarian side, we’ve got a long involvement in the needle trades. My grandmother’s sister Betty was some kind of fashion model, who “went around with” and then married the son of aManhattan factory owner, whose workers attached soutache … Continue reading →

The Republicans are at it again in Florida.