Gerry Goldstein

The late Dr. Frank Jobe, who never threw a pitch in the major leagues, has nonetheless been honored with displays and events at the Baseball Hall of Fame.  But Doctor Jobe is not a Hall inductee and has no bronze plaque hanging there. Neither does his most famous patient, the late Dodgers and Yankees pitcher […]

They’re gone now, but they provided our culture with enduring gifts. Folk singer Burl Ives left us his version of a bouncy holiday song, “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” Sultry Lena Horne left us her classic recordings of “Stormy Weather.” Banjo-playing Pete Seeger left a catalogue of music, much of it anti-war, as in “Where Have […]

August is nearly upon us, so the best advice is to lock your doors, lower the shades, and pretend nobody’s home. Because you know that at this point in the gardening season a neighbor is sure to stop by with a bulging bagful of home-grown squash. When this happens, at least give credit to the […]

The pundits and TV talking heads have recently bandied about a relatively new term, “asymmetrical war.” As it suggests, this refers to a conflict in which one of the combatants is militarily far stronger than the other. The term was created in 1975 by the late political scientist Andrew J. R. Mack, whose seminal essay […]

Psychologically speaking, I am off-kilter. I suffer from a variety of maladies, including tyrannophobia, authoritophobia, politicophobia, and TAD. Coincidentally (or not), these conditions arose concurrently with the ascendance of His Royal Vileness, Donald J. Trump, to the highest office in our land. That’s where TAD –Trump Anxiety Disorder – comes in. Never before have I […]

Abraham Lincoln was a chump. Oh, that’s not my opinion, but in one respect it seems to be Donald Trump’s.   As we have learned, Qatar gave Trump a $400 million Boeing 747 for use as a new Air Force One. When he leaves office, he said, he plans to transfer the aircraft, which some describe […]

The Civil War was new in 1861 when Brooklyn’s 14th Regiment, soon bound for battle, heard these words from abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher: “A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself.” That’s still food for thought in 2026, as this American prepares to exchange his wind-worn […]

Our government recently reported performing a “double tap” in September on a boat suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean. This was some tap – two missile strikes that instantly killed nine men and then blew apart two survivors clinging to the wreckage. So there, in the words of “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth, we have the deployment […]

An ancient Jewish proverb asserts, “As soap is to the body, so laughter is to the soul.” As we anticipate the start of a new year after an old one fraught with dysfunction, this provides us grist for a crucial resolution: to make time for laughter. The soap analogy is particularly fitting for our time, […]

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 […]

You couldn’t call it a Christmas miracle, because it happened in March – but it had Christmas written all over it. This was a few decades ago, but the spirit of it still burns bright, which is what miracles tend to do. And adding intrigue to the tale is whether it really involved a miracle at […]

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 […]

The actress Bette Davis once said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” As a practicing octogenarian I can attest to this, while also appreciating advice on staying young from 19th Century President James A. Garfield: “If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should […]

The recent demonstrations on college campuses produced varying opinions on how administrators can respect freedom of speech while keeping protesters from trampling the rights of others. The issue was more straightforward decades ago, when as a crusading student newspaper editor I tested the waters of protest at our state university in Kingston. It did not […]

Now that the political season is moving along in earnest, it’s time to examine the Monster Raving Loony Party. And I don’t mean the party of MAGA loons who obsess over Jewish space lasers and idolize the Proud Boys. The Loony Party actually exists, in our mother country across the pond – where for 40 […]

TV commercials during the Super Bowl earlier this month continued to attract nearly as much attention as the game itself, and one of the most popular of the entries had an unintentional local flavor. The ad, featuring heavily-accented Arnold Schwarzenegger, was built around the actor’s inability (like many a Rhode Islander) to pronounce that final […]

We know a rose by any other name would smell as sweet because Shakespeare told us so. Now the question arises: would a bird by any other name tweet as sweet? The answer is a definite “yes,” according to the American Ornithological Society, which has announced plans to rename all birds currently named after people. […]

Without much fanfare, print newspapering in Rhode Island suffered some body blows recently, and though my view on this surely dates me, I grieve the situation. In August, two community weeklies, the Chariho Times in South County and the Coventry Courier, shut down. Now, two daily newspapers that have served the Blackstone Valley since the 19th Century, the Woonsocket Call and […]

“A kiss is just a kiss,” asserted composer Herman Hupfeld in 1931 when he wrote “As Time Goes By,” the song that years later would so enhance the iconic film Casablanca. Not to quibble with the talented Mr. Hupfeld, but events down the generations have shown that a smackeroo can be much more than “just” a kiss. […]

When frail, 110-pound George W. Jorgensen turned 18 in 1944, he tried to enlist in the wartime Army, which took a peek at his wispy frame and rejected him. But leave it to the Army, a few months later it drafted Jorgensen and he served two years as a clerk at Fort Dix, N.J. before […]

News outlets recently noted the death in prison of one-time Patriarca Family crime boss Francis Salemme, better known in La Cosa Nostra circles as “Cadillac Frank.” One might think the nickname derived from a love of those high-end cars, but urban legend says otherwise, asserting that when he once worked at a Boston auto body […]