Tropical Storm Isaias swept through our area yesterday, and it made for a good news/bad news kind of day at our house. The storm knocked out power to our neighborhood (not to mention thousands of other PSE&G customers)…
Author: Paul Knight
Side Effects
This past Saturday I had a strange experience. I was unaccountably weary all day. I felt as if I’d spent the previous day strenuously exerting myself and then gotten only half a night’s sleep. . . It didn’t occur to me until after I’d turned the light out that night that I’d had the second dose of the Shingrix shingles vaccine the day before…
The Second-Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes
One of my most enduring interests is presidential politics. Ever since I majored in Political Science as an undergraduate, I’ve avidly followed each presidential race. I’m not into sports, so the quadrennial presidential contests are like my Super Bowl, World Series and World Cup rolled into one. I’m not typical…
Is Donald Trump the Biggest Threat to the Future of the Republican Party?
I was a campaign volunteer during the 2018 congressional election, phoning and canvassing on behalf of a New Jersey Democratic candidate in hopes of flipping a House seat and ultimately the entire House. My guy won, and of course the larger goal was also accomplished. I had the honor of attending the new representative’s swearing-in…
This Music Is My Drug
When I need to do a lot of physical work around the house, I put on exuberant, up-tempo music — loud. I’ve got a “Favorite Uptempo” playlist on my phone with songs like Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. (Ebullient songs like Sara Bareilles’s Brave and The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations make their way onto the list even if they’re not especially fast.) I start playing that list and I’m off to the races…
Remembering Names
I mentioned in an earlier post that my memory is not what it used to be, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a particularly good memory for names. I have to really work at getting a name embedded in my head. Even 30 seconds after being introduced to someone, I often have to say, “Would you please remind me of your name?”…
Reading Books
As I’ve mentioned, I read a lot. Most of the books I read are non-fiction — history, biographies, economics, politics, and various other topics. As it happens, there’s a book club in my neighborhood that’s been meeting for years, but it’s restricted to women, and they read only literary fiction. A year and a half ago one of my neighbors, who reads a lot of history, asked if I’d be interested in forming a non-fiction book club for the men in the neighborhood.
Darin’s Rule
I was having lunch with a friend of mine, Darin, last year (back in the old days when you could still have lunch with people) and we got to talking about how to strike the right balance when it comes to our news consumption. In an age when the internet will serve up as much news as anyone could possible consume, how do you ensure that you’re well enough informed to fulfill your role as a citizen without overdosing?…
My Men’s Group
In the spring of 1994, a friend of mine, David Raymond, asked me if I’d like to come to a meeting of what he called a “men’s group” that he was going to host at his house. The participants he had in mind were all graduates of the Landmark Forum, a three-day personal development course that I’d taken several years earlier, and his intention was that we would meet monthly to talk about “life stuff”…
A Masked New World
If someone had told me in January that within six months I would be in possession of a veritable wardrobe of face masks, well . . . you can imagine.