My dear wife Susan had hip replacement surgery about seven weeks ago, which gave me access to a very limited supply of Oxycodone. I tried one one day, and two another day, at risk of being constipated (it does that to you). One pill was vaguely pleasant; two added up to sleepy-sleety, not-so-good, vague. Not worth risking constipation.

The New York Times has been warning me (and you) constantly for the past few months that any amount of alcohol is bad for the brain. Still, I drink wine with every dinner, which unfortunately makes me sleepy a couple of hours after dinner, which means I lose track of what’s going on in the detective shows. I also mix myself maybe two cocktails per week (gin or vodka, combined with something, hopefully also with a dash of tart cherry juice). Cocktails really open me up to gladness and conversation for about 45 minutes, which is not a bad run in this Time of Trump. I sometimes even make phone calls during those 45 minutes, if Susan is not around to share my mood.

“Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright”. —Donald Fagen, I.G.Y.

The song “I.G.Y.” is now over four decades old, and I’ve wondered for all these years if Donald Fagen was being 100% ironic when he wrote it.

The initials stand for the International Geophysical Year, a project of international scientific cooperation that involved sixty-six countries in 1957-’58. The song deliberately embodies the naive optimism of that project.

My kids are far away — one in South Carolina, one in California, with me in New York — and they’re solidly adult, each on the verge of 40 (twins, yes, gal and guy), so my sense of being their father is mostly nostalgic these days. I’m off the hook: They’re doing more than okay, in a time when doing more than okay, if you’re under 45, is a real achievement.

My part in that achievement? I asked them, last Fathers Day, to tell me about three things I did well as a father. Their responses were similar: that I brought them quite a bit of fun, that I encouraged them to pursue their interests and not worry too much about the other stuff, and that I paid attention enough to really know them without making them too uncomfortable.

I had my annual physical this week and told my doctor, “So far, I’m an immortal” —meaning, I don’t yet know what my disease will be, I’ve not yet been diagnosed with a condition, I’m not taking any medications. When my blood work comes back next week, I expect to be in the safe range on every count.

This is not just a function of good luck. Nor of my genes. It’s as much a result of never doing physically punishing work in crappy environments; never going without food or medical attention; never living in a state of constant, inescapable anxiety, under a cloud of despair.

I’m not completely sure how I feel about assassinating fascists before they start assassinating us — but I acknowledge that in most cases, though by no means all, assassination, like terrorism, is an expression of political weakness, testifying to the lack of ability to foment mass action and make meaningful change.

Which begs the question: Why aren’t they organizing? The liberal establishment, I mean. Didn’t they read Project 2025? Why are they still acting like they’re in a bad dream in which they’re not wearing any pants?

About six months ago, after a particularly vigorous two hours of pickleball (my only real form of exercise since my dog died), I suffered an episode of anaphylactic shock. My skin got red and horribly itchy, my tongue swelled, and I passed out twice.

I had no explanation for this. No insect had stung me (and I’m not allergic to stings). I hadn’t eaten anything unusual (and I’m not allergic to any foods). I had swallowed two aspirins about an hour before the game, but I’ve always used aspirin as my pain-reliever of choice and have never reacted badly to it. Nevertheless, on doctor’s orders, I did an aspirin “challenge” at an allergist’s office a couple of weeks later. No problem whatsoever.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, as I do nearly every night, my brain falls into a loop of obsessive worrying. About what? About WHATEVER. It’s a habit, left over from my working days, when I actually had lots to worry about and never could sleep for more than five or six hours a night.

You wouldn’t want to be visiting my brain at 3:30 in the morning. Usually I have to turn on the radio at a very low volume, so I can focus on the terrible global news, which distracts me from my personal nonsense and lets me fall back to sleep.

It’s no fun! So I’m trying to train my brain to obsess, instead, on pleasant memories. Writing this piece is part of the training. . .

In 1951, the year of my birth, the global average for human life expectancy was 46. Today it is 73.

The percentage of malnourished people in the world has declined from over 60% in 1951 to 9% today — Gaza and South Sudan notwithstanding.

In America, the average annual income from wages in 1951 was $2,799. Today it is over $67,000 — almost exactly double when adjusted for inflation.

In 1951, twenty-one American states mandated and/or enforced racial segregation with the full power of government and custom. Today, segregation cannot be mandated or legally enforced.

There’s a point made by Shelby Steele in his 1990 book, The Content of Our Character, which has nagged at me for thirty-five years: that our leftwing political passions are motivated, in part, by our desire to claim innocence, to view ourselves as virtuous non-perpetrators of injustice. 

“Of the many offenses against the Constitution, the economy, free speech, and American civilization committed by Trump so far, his white supremacist crackdown on truth is what disturbs me most. It’s largely unnamed but it’s right there, undergirding all his ugly moves: RACISM. There’s the evisceration of the federal civil service, which is especially damaging to the Black middle class; there’s the dehumanization and mass expulsion of non-white immigrants from the land; there’s the onslaught of attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, which constitute Trump’s reprise of the end of Reconstruction in the 19th century; there’s the imminent gutting of anti-poverty programs like Head Start, which seek, among other things, to overcome the overwhelming impacts of institutional racism. 

Since the middle of August we’ve been sharing our house and our table with an Iranian-born Shi’a Muslim who spent the last thirty-three years in prison. (I’ll call him “K” as a deliberate nod to Franz Kafka’s masterwork, The Trial, because that’s what his life feels like.)

K is a charming man, 74 years old, deeply religious, and very used to keeping to himself, so even in our small house, he’s a pretty unobtrusive guest. During these seven months, he has learned how to use a computer and an iPhone, and he has had knee replacement surgery and several other medical needs met. He has entered the 21st century, in other words — with hours of guidance and transportation from my wife (who used to visit him in prison two or three times a year for about nine years) and me (who never met him until he crossed our threshold).

This guy in France who drugged and raped his wife continually — and the 50-odd Frenchmen who allegedly joined in over the years, shoving their dicks into a slack, unconscious woman — what is that? What kind of consciousness wants to do that, let alone gives the conscience permission to do it?

Those thousands and thousands of men who ogle pre-adolescent girls on Instagram, fostering 500,000 “inappropriate” interactions every day, says the New York Times — who are they? What happened to them to make them sexually turned on by children?

”All through the day: I me mine I me mine I me mine.” —George Harrison

As I anticipate Yom Kippur landing with a -plotz!-, I’m thinking about that cartoon in which the waiter asks the diners after they’ve been served their plates: “Is anything all right?”

These days, nothing much seems all right to me, outside my golden bubble. We’re murdering our planet; we’re spending billions and billions on Artificial Intelligence, despite having seen The Terminator three times apiece; we’re adjusting to depression, isolation, conformity, and anxious chatter so beautifully that we don’t even go out to movie theaters, let alone bowling alleys, any more; and we are lied to constantly, yet remain naive enough to allow the repetition to seduce at least some of us into believing that IT MUST BE SO.

When I was a child of about six, I was on a bus with my mother, watching passengers sit, stand, and get on and off. All of a sudden I was struck by the realization that each person I was looking at had a personality, a brain, an entire life behind their face. Each was as full and genuine a person as I . . .

• A Jaguar sedan is passing us on the left. Handsome black car. Siri tells us that 21,000 of them are sold in the USA each year.

“Ask Siri about real jaguars.” “What about real jaguars, Siri?” After a few false starts, Siri determines that only eight wild jaguars have been spotted in the USA over the past thirty years, all thought to be immigrants from Mexico.

Nearly two years ago I wrote here about my involvement with a volunteer circle of about twenty people who were working together to enable two refugee families from Afghanistan to settle in our neck of the woods.

Well, that volunteer circle is about to dissolve its bank account. Our refugees have been granted asylum and have secured places to live, jobs and start-up businesses, driving licenses and vehicles, medical insurance, food stamps, and more . . .

In our increasingly authoritarian world, I’ve been thinking a lot about social hierarchy.

My interest has been especially stoked by the seeming indestructibility of Donald Trump’s charisma for that mass of people who think he’s the messiah. How does it happen that vulgar, monstrous, narcissistic, ridiculous men become world leaders and world destroyers, over and over?

My contemplation of hierarchy was also provoked by the Academy Awards, a spectacle that I am always happy not to watch: the nauseating mixture of liberalism and show-off wealth, the Marie Antoinettishness of it all. I don’t enjoy the foolishness of seeing artworks ranked, and I have no desire to idolize actors, only to enjoy their work . . .

In my years of reading Jewish texts, one particular teaching has particularly popped for me, the atheist, because it encapsulates what I believe to be an actual reality principle.

I’m talking about Judaism’s recognition that justice must be balanced with mercy or the world will not endure. The Talmud expresses this in several passages. Here are three:

“When the Holy One was about to create Adam, he saw both the righteous and the wicked who were to issue from him. So he said: If I create him, the wicked will issue from him; if I do not create him, how are the righteous to be born? What did the Holy One do? He diverted the way of the wicked from before his sight, partnered the quality of mercy with himself . . . and then created him.” (From the midrash collection, Genesis Rabbah, as translated in Bialik and Ravnitzky’s indispensable The Book of Legends.)

I’m in the Confederacy once again, visiting my 6-year-old grandson in South Carolina on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend. En route this past Wednesday, we stopped the car to stretch our legs in a little town off Interstate 81 in eastern Pennsylvania. Since the day was blustery, we took our stretch in a shopping mall.

Like many shopping malls these days — including the one half an hour from my home in Ulster County, NY — this one was eerily deserted, with fewer than one out of ten of its stores occupied. Dimly lit, with barely any foot-traffic, the place felt post-apocalyptic, neutron-bombish — this less than three hours from the wealth and bustle of New York City.

It dates me to say I’ve been writing or co-writing editorials advocating a two-state peace arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians for over forty years: during the 1978 Camp David Accords (“When the self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza is established and inaugurated, the transitional period of five years will begin”); through the years of Peace Now activism in the 1980s; during the Madrid Conference (1991), the Oslo Accords (1993), and Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit (2000); following the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 and the Road Map for Peace and Geneva Accord of 2003; and so forth and so on.

Each little essay made virtually the same points: that Israel’s security and soul required the just treatment of the Palestinian people and the establishment of their own state; that Palestinian terrorism, and the deep hatred and distrust that it bred among Israelis, was the ugliest, worst possible strategy for ending the occupation; that Israel’s land-greed and violations of international law could only produce more horror; that both peoples, Jews and Palestinians, had wholly legitimate claims to national status, as recognized by the United Nations way back in 1947.