Gerry Goldstein

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 […]