Gerry Goldstein

It’s holiday season, and what could be more delightful than savoring Grandma’s chocolate-covered brownies? Helpful spirit that I am (and since Dec. 8 actually happens to be – no lie – National Brownie Day), I’m gifting grandmas everywhere this year with a fail-safe recipe for these treats from an unimpeachable source: the United States Department […]

Here at Shalom Acres, our little hobby farm in Greenville’s Apple Valley, the leaves are mostly fallen, we’ve had a couple of hard frosts, and our once-lush vegetable gardens are barren – a combination that for some might seem depressing. But wait. In all this there is pending rebirth and promise at the darkest time of […]

This is the time of year when traditionally, youngsters contemplate novel ways to be terrifying.  One suspects few could generate the enthusiasm of Exeter’s Lewis E. Peck Jr., whose Halloween hi-jinks were matchless. Of course, he had lots of experience refining his act, since he kept it going well into his sixties. Peck had reasons […]

Three times in recent weeks, a person has been swept from the rocks into perilous waters.

Someone recently posted on Facebook a cartoon in which talking horses were participating in a “Gallop” poll.  As you might imagine, this unleashed a flurry of responses using similar wordplay, many of them certifiable groaners. Among these offenders was mine, but don’t forward it anywhere – it’s not, strictly speaking, what I wish to be known for. […]

I’m wide awake, but am I “woke?” And if I am “woke,” is that good or bad? Such are the dilemmas we face as social media and malicious politics spawn new ways for us to praise and insult one another – sometimes using the same new word for both purposes. Suddenly, we’re awash in coinages, […]

I was saddened to read in the New York Times recently that a canary in the coal mine has died. And a true songbird he was, filling Carnegie Hall in 1966 with his guitar and his blues before chucking his abbreviated fame and embracing the tranquility of rural Perryville in South Kingstown. This was more […]

During many decades in the news business, I wrote and edited more than my share of obituaries, and found the task fulfilling. There’s satisfaction in reviewing a life well (or not so well) lived, and capturing the essence of it as an example for others to either emulate or eschew.   It’s been a while […]

Those of us whose professional tools are limited to words delight in discovering anew one, as I did the other day – and after the year we’ve all been through this onecouldn’t have surfaced at a more opportune time. So allow me to introduce “paraprosdokian,” which, when I stumbled across itdoing some column research, was […]

If there are children in the room as you read this, please shoo them away, because what follows is an intensely personal revelation on an issue they may not be old enough to understand. In the interest of journalistic transparency, here is my confession: I am a sapiosexual. How do I know? Because this new word, […]

“Dear Santa: I’m Jewish, but I really love U. Can U give me a present though. (Please don’t give me coal).” This letter to Santa, which often pops up in anthologies of communication with the jolly old gent, transports me to a long-ago time when as a Jewish kid myself, I also had a question […]