Magical Thinking By Leonard Zwelling I first came upon this term in 2005 when I read Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. To simplify, magical thinking is the belief that thoughts can influence the physical world. If I wish for something …
Addresses By Leonard Zwelling A little reportage from the front. Apparently your friends at MD Anderson Information Systems are watching you. They will notice if you log into the network from an IP address distant from Houston and ask you whether you have taken leave and/or have registered your travel from Houston in …
Choosing A Bus Driver By Leonard Zwelling A reader presented me with a good question from Twitter the other day. If you were at a bus stop waiting for the school bus with your child and the bus arrived with Joe Biden at the wheel, would you let your kid on the bus? …
The Future Is Not Bleak By Leonard Zwelling This front page story in The New York Times of June 13 by Lisa Lerer and Dave Umhoefer relates the general feeling in the country, along the full political spectrum, that things are not going well at all in America. Chuck Todd reported on Meet The …
China By Leonard Zwelling Here’s the last line of this op-ed from The Wall Street Journal on May 1. “The point would be to pair economic concerns with national-security aims, protect intellectual property, and ensure reliable access to public-health goods—so the U.S. is no longer at the mercy of Beijing for supplies in …
Women Leaders By Leonard Zwelling In The New York Times on June 14, Nicholas Kristof observes that countries led by women have handled their responses to the pandemic better than those led by men. Specifically he identifies New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland and Norway as having had better outcomes in terms of …
What’s News? What’s Opinion? BY Leonard Zwelling It used to be easy to discern what was news and what was editorial opinion. They were on different pages of the newspaper. Now that so many get their “news” on the Internet where the separation may be less clear, the two begin to blend. Factor …
Crowds By Leonard Zwelling This op-ed by Abigail Shrier in The Wall Street Journal on June 6 makes a very critical point about the hypocrisy governing America’s response to the coronavirus and to the death of George Floyd. In the first case, we were told to hunker down, stay out of crowds, and particularly …
Why “#BLM” Matters. A Personal Journey To Partial Wokeness And The E Word, Equality. By Leonard Zwelling It’s been with me my whole life. That is the issue of racism in the United States and in my own existence. Even today it is both hard to face and hard to write about, but I’ll …
How Did One Death Do What 100,000 Couldn’t By Leonard Zwelling The funeral for George Floyd in Houston will be a solemn affair. The protests in response to his death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police started off peacefully, but it is likely that the peaceful protesters were infiltrated by extremists from the …
