Children of the Pandemic
As a toddler during World War II, playing in our comfy living room in Detroit, I was unaware of the fear and anxiety that permeated the adult life around me. Not just the threat of war possibly arriving at our shore, but the knowledge that my parent's families in France were possibly subject to the horrors of the holocaust. And word of their fate, their actual status, was unavailing.
The Passover Lesson That Can Save us All
The central tenet of the Jewish holiday, Passover, is the celebration of God's deliverance of the Jewsfrom slavery. But that deliverance came because the Jews were warned to paint their doors with the blood of a sacrificial lamb so that God's wrath would spare the Jews of the slaughter of their first-born sons. That was the final plague Moses proclaimed against the Egyptians. The pharaoh's refusal to free the Jews when faced with this tenth, terrible plague forced God's hand.
Your Brain on Social Isolation
Social isolation is human despair. We evolved down from primates who were all blessed and sometimes cursed with group membership. Simply put: no (hu)man is an island.The strangest, and some ways most disturbing, example of social isolation I ever experienced was as a senior officer on a Coast Guard ship were I was sent for a very brief tour. It was during the Vietnam war and I was serving in the Public Health Service. A requirement of that service was to do a 3-week junket providing medical coverage for a small sector, in the North Atlantic —the Sea of Labrador—as part of America's commitment to NATO.
How to Write a Children's Book
Panzil. How did I think of that?
I can blame my late friend, David Gordon, who coaxed me into writing a children's book. He was a graphic designer and he let me use his back office and his dining room during a dark time in my life, a time when one of my children was suffering from a debilitating illness that was worsening.
Shut Up, I'm Reading
I remember the first time I held a crayon. The color (blue) and the iconic Crayola wrapper fixed themselves in my memory. But that memory was only retrieved, twenty-plus years later, when my two-year-old son fisted his first crayon.Crayons gave way, under first-grade teacher’s orders, to pencils and then, in third grade, a pen holder with its nib poised over an inkwell sunk in the corner of my school desk, the requisite yellow chamois somewhere at the mop-up ready.
Love That Has No Name
My child — the child within me — loves dinosaurs, dragons, and robots. Today, nowadays, robots are the winners. Jurassic Park dinosaurs are for adventures on a razor edge and the adventure ends there. Dragons are for renting out powers like flying, fire-breath, and gentle menacing but then you have to cage them and get back to the everyday.Robots, keen and smart and enigmatic, are for pairing up with these mentally immaculate beings, geniuses with talents to invent and deploy all kinds of wondrous things without showing ego or affect
Machines Like Us
Every era, every generation seems to have its horrors. But none of them, past or present, equate. We are in a particularly rough patch: right-wind attitudes are moving to the forefront and the planet seems to be readying for death by human hands.
The Sex Life of Tadpoles
Giving a speech at a conference on sexual abuse, I was asked if prepubescent girls and boys can, especially after a sexual assault, masturbate to orgasm, alone, independently.It’s a known fact that males can be sexually excited even when they are forced to have sex.
Why Do We Call It Asperger's?
I first encountered Carl, my wife's cousin, in a high school biology class. He stood out because of his nearly white hair, eyes that were always staring past you, and a tendency to interrupt the class asking peculiar questions tangentially related to the topic being discussed—"why is a tadpole forced to become a frog?"
One in Ten?
While in Med school one of my friends, whom today one would call a "cis"—a totally straight guy, had a urological exam for prostatitis that involved prostatic massage. He bounced out of that clinic exclaiming, "Wow! Now I get why gay guys love anal sex."
When Can I Touch You?
While in high school I volunteered to read to the blind. The program assigned me to Robert, a pixie-ish young man who was a music student at the local college. Though he read braille fluently and books on tape were available, the texts he needed were only in print.It took me a while to adjust to his touching, his need to take my arm when going somewhere, his delight in touching objects to get their feel, to “see” them as he said.