Gerry Goldstein

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 […]