My husband adores stand up comedy. I do not. My siblings all rave about Curb Your Enthusiasm. I think it’s mean and unfunny. Others in my book club–the less fun one–cracked up over Where’d You Go, Bernadette. I found everyone in it profoundly unpleasant. Clearly, humor is in the funny bone of the beholder. I…

Today, when a friend on Facebook pointed out that you can’t have a pandemic without panic, I was practicing deep breathing. (I’d just read the New York Times.) I had, like so many, been freaking out. But then I started to read about the 1918 flu and how much better off we are facing this…

I just finished reading two books, Maria Vale’s Season of the Wolf and Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me. Both made me think about the role of politics in fiction. In Vale’s The Legend of All Wolves series, the reader sees human incursion into nature and man’s love of sport hunting from the perspective of wolves. Vale…