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.) . . .

OK, we’re bringing back one of our early Writing About Our Generation features, a new question for you, loyal reader:

What’s your favorite song? All right, we’ll make it easier:

What are your three favorite songs?

The songs that you still want to hear again and again. The songs that immediately conjure up distinct memories. The songs that have been the soundtrack of your life.

You’ve lived through one of the most dynamic, creative, varied periods in music history, a period that saw the birth of rock and roll, the life and death of disco, the metamorphosis of country, the dominance of hip hop. What has stayed with you? . . .

      I have always loved dancing and can honestly say I am a surprisingly good dancer. Maybe because I’ve been dancing all my life—and will continue to.

      I have learned how to do the James Brown Shuffle, the Michael Jackson Air Walk, the Tina Turner Bump and Grind and excelled at the Shimmy Shimmy Shake Shake. I grew up watching Dick Clark and his American Bandstand TV show and as a young teen would sneak off to Philadelphia to join the “Geater with the Heater”—Gerry Blavet—at his live dances.

      Our generation, I think, is the best at dancing because dancing was so important to us. We did the Twist, the Mashed Potato, the Monster Mash, the Hully Gully, the Pony, the Hitch Hike, the Swim and the Locomotion, to name just a few. . . .

My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.

Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer.

It's not bitter, not sweet; it's the dry flavored treat.

Won't you try extra dry Rheingold beer?

For no reason at all, at least no reason I can think of, this 1950s-era beer jingle popped into my head the other day. To make matters worse, I began singing it—and immediately, my friend Mitch began singing along. Because, of course, he knew the jingle, too, and the tune, such as it was.

Without really trying to, we had dredged it up from the deep recesses of our brains. We had not known at all that we remembered the jingle, had not thought of the jingle in years, but once the first few words came, the brain went into automatic response mold and there was the entire thing. . . .

      On July 16, we celebrated—or, actually, failed to celebrate—the 79th anniversary of the beginning of the Atomic Age. Okay, a 79th birthday is not usually something to make a fuss about. However, I’m going to use this one to take stock of the Atomic Age—an age (the age?) in which all of us have lived for all or most of our lives.

       I want to make some points—including one controversial point—about nuclear weapons: about the history of employing for potential military use the vast energy derived by splitting the nuclei of uranium or plutonium (fission)—or, subsequently, the even vaster energy produced by fusing hydrogen nuclei to form helium (fusion).

      But first let me briefly commemorate the anniversary . . . .

Sunday afternoon, while most of the country—and much of the world—was reeling from the big news and madly scrolling thru social media updates, my daughter and I were laughing uproariously for about two straight hours.

No, we didn’t find news of Joe Biden stepping aside amusing and surely not guffaw-level. We were in an Off-Broadway theater watching a hilarious comedy (“The Play That Goes Wrong”), blissfully unaware of the news.

We hadn’t checked our phones en route to or on arriving at the theater, nor during intermission, and not even when we came out of the theater. Afterward, we relaxed outdoors in a little park next door, happily reliving favorite scenes from the play. . . .

My wife Kathy says I'm married to my phone. This week I won't deny it:

It's the most exciting political week I've experienced since the Watergate hearings led me to journalism as a career 50 years ago. 

Last Sunday, I was nearing despair, figuring out where to move after Donald Trump crushed Joe Biden in the presidential election. I was losing faith Biden would see the wisdom—the absolutely necessity—of his dropping out of the race. Then, just as quickly, he dropped out and passed the torch to his vice-president.

What followed was stunning. She raised $100 million in less than two days, 62 percent from first-time donors to this campaign. Her campaign signed up 28,000 new volunteers in a day. . . .