From the west side of the island, a pedestrian can see, high in the misty gray sky of Manhattan, the carmine lettering of The New Yorker hotel. The art-deco staple of the Jazz Age has graced the skyline of the city since 1930. It has hosted movie stars and starlets, ballplayers and boxers, heroic firefighters and geniuses of science. Barack Obama’s parents were married there. It is a beacon of bourgeois New York life. City dwellers and tourists see it as a kind of marker of pedigree, its neon serifs floating like a semaphore of sophistication above the bustling metropolis below. Fittingly, it is where elitist insider and liberal icon Hillary Clinton conceded the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Pale and proud, she positioned herself as a champion of women, her flour-haired éminence grise clapping in the background. More

It’s six in the morning here in Oregon City. The sun won’t be up for another hour. The west wind is rattling the windows. I hope a storm is brewing. We need the rain. Then I hear the tea kettle sputtering. The damn thing refuses to whistle. I make pot of Moroccan mint tea and settle behind my battered Mac. The new grandkid is already up, has been for an hour or so, gnawing on the ears of a stuffed toy grizzly that Kimberly and I picked up several years ago in Yellowstone.  The once feral gray cat who has no known name is now curled up at my feet and the sleek black cat we call Baudelaire is standing on the table brushing his back against the screen. There will be no breakfast. There hasn’t been any breakfast in a year. I’ve been bamboozled into following an “intermittent fast,” which prohibits any food from 7 PM to 11 AM. I don’t recommend it. More

Who needs dystopian political fiction in the age of the orange-tinted monstrosity that calls itself Donald Trump [1]? Two Thursdays ago, as news came in of fatalities and massive destruction caused by a record-setting hurricane that slammed into the Florida Panhandle and Georgia the previous night, cable news buzzed with the story of a strange soap opera that had just unfolded in the Oval Office. In a bizarre reality television episode from the White House, the mentally disturbed Kardashian family member/victim Kanye West gave Trump a model “iPlane,” because, he said, “this is what our president should be flying in.”  More