Gerry Goldstein

I don’t know about you, but I keep getting my generations mixed up.  That’s easy to do these days, what with pop culture references constantly bombarding us with the opinions and preferences of people belonging to Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z. Throw in Millennials, Gen Alpha and Gen Beta and I’m lost in […]

In a democracy, citizens are guaranteed certain rights, and we can read them just as they appear in the Constitution: –  Political power emanates from the people. – All…are equal before the law.  – Officials are servants of the whole community and not of a party. But wait: Those guarantees are taken not from our own […]

Teaching moments pop up often, but sometimes they vanish too quickly for us to learn the intended lesson.   So it was recently at the supermarket entrance, where a 10-year-old girl stood beside a sign hand-lettered in red crayon, asking for donations so she could pay for dance lessons. With her mother sitting expressionless behind […]

I hate that Charlie Kirk was mercilessly shot down. But I also hate some poisonous ideas he embraced and sought to sow among our nation’s youth. So there, in the words right above, may be “hate speech.”  And if Pam Bondi thinks so, it could be enough to get me collared. At least, that’s how […]

Our dictatorial president, determined to erase any hint of American history that offends his relentless jingoism, could learn a lot from the day 70 years ago when they buried an affable 14-year-old boy in Chicago. A horrific series of events began when, visiting relatives in Mississippi, he walked into a grocery store to buy bubble […]

Whenever a new statue is unveiled, you can be sure opinion will divide on whether it hits the mark. And that’s been the case since the Patriots recently introduced their new iteration of legendary Tom Brady, a bronze colossus that with its five-foot base stands 17 feet tall. The image by Massachusetts sculptor Jeff Buccacio, […]

It is 2 a.m., and the household is blissfully and restfully asleep. Suddenly, filtered though the haze of sleep and dreams, comes a familiar and unwelcome whisper: Chirp. Maybe it’s just imagination; wait a few moments. And then: Chirp! When a third chirp follows, all grounds for denial evaporate: These are the dreaded overnight announcements that the […]

We are long past July’s iconic holiday, the Fourth, but coming up on the 17th is one of lesser reputation that could easily make you 😃. That’s right; we are approaching World Emoji Day, a time to celebrate the little characters and symbols that let us wordlessly communicate our feelings. The media site National Today, which tracks […]

A centuries-old promise: No free man shall be taken or imprisoned…or exiled, or in any way ruined,…except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. There’s irony in that pledge, given that we’re witnessing men and women, including a physician at Brown University, summarily scooped up and deported without […]

A limerick is funny, but terse, A short and succinct piece of verse. In only five lines The humor it mines Runs from ribald to bawdy to worse. So there you have my home-made contribution to one of the least known May holidays, which arrives each year on the 12th: National Limerick Day. The date […]

This may sound a bissel meshuga (a little crazy), but the name of a common play in pro football these days comes straight from Yiddish. And the term has given new meaning to the most important part of the game, the end zone. That’s because we have witnessed the rise of the “tush push,” the strategy of […]

As a wildlife specimen, the gila monster is as off-putting as they come. This lizard’s head seems too big for its body, its legs are short, it’s slow and sluggish, and its venom is fatally toxic. It’s hardly a poster child for National Wildlife Week, coming up April 5-9. But wait – millions of human […]

Ben Franklin sagely advised, “Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.”  But watching pennies could become a gainless pursuit now that Donald Trump has ordered the Treasury Department to stop making them. The logic is understandable – it costs more to make a penny than it’s worth and most people think […]

The Trump nomination of Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon has sparked talk about his argument that women should be barred from the front lines in battle. Actually, any remaining barriers to women serving in combat evaporated in 2015, when the Defense Department ordered the military to open all jobs to them, no matter how […]

With the old year about to end, it’s time again to review the new words that have made it into dictionaries and other lexicons over the past 12 months, starting with the “Word of the Year” as chosen by the Oxford University Press: “Brain rot.” This denotes the numbing of a person’s intellect, and I […]

Even though he ruled Rome nearly 2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius made news recently in  – of all places – the National Football League, when Patriots’ player Deatrich Wise Jr. quoted the ancient emperor-philosopher during a press conference. The aptly-named Wise invoked sagacity from the Roman leader’s diary-like Meditations, musings to himself on morals and self-improvement that […]