Len Zwelling

I had been debating how to write this blog for almost a week when I read John Anderson’s piece in The Wall Street Journal that said it all.

The performances by the athletes thus far (it’s August 4 as I write) have been spectacular. The United States has done well in gymnastics and track and field and certainly in swimming. The woman’s soccer team will not win gold this time, but Xander Shauffele won the men’s golf and Nelly Korda the women’s golf. As of a few days ago, the American woman were outdoing the men. All of this is good and entertaining—if you didn’t have to battle so hard to see it.

He was simply the Boss in the office of the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) in 2009 when I worked there. The first time we met was at a Monday staff meeting. The entire HELP staff was there along with video feeds from Wyoming, Senator Enzi’s home state. Promptly at 1 PM a man of average height and a little overweight wearing a plain black suit, white shirt, black tie and highly polished slip-on loafers walked into the room and stood right in front of me.

I rose from my seat, stuck out my hand and introduced myself. In a sea of faces, Senator Enzi recognized the new one right away.

Steven Weinberg was a world-renown Nobel Laureate in particle physics. No, I had never heard of him either, but that was a deficiency on my part because he was a giant. The details of what he accomplished are described in the obituary from The New York Times on July 26, but the point of this blog is not to recapitulate what he alone can adequately describe about his seminal work.

The fondest memory I have of my late mother-in-law Seretta Miller Kleinerman is the date we had in New York in the late 1980s. I had given a talk at NYU, I believe, and she was still living in Englewood, New Jersey as my father-in-law was the chief of Pathology at Mt. Sinai at the time. My mother-in-law loved Broadway, especially musicals. When she asked me what I wanted to see when I came in, I did not hesitate. I wanted the hottest ticket on Broadway at the time—The World According To Me, the one-man show starring Jackie Mason.

I was pleased to see this editorial in The Wall Street Journal on July 23. I have been mulling this exact issue for the past few weeks. What is the point of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic placing civilians into space? Sure, it’s an exciting adventure for the space travelers, but as the op-ed points out, space flight is not as routine as taking a commercial jet from Houston to LaGuardia. Space flight is dangerous.

On November 18, 1978, The Reverend Jim Jones led the mass suicide of 918 of his followers in Guyana. It is generally thought that the people from the People’s Temple died by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. It was really Flavor Aid and had all sorts of drugs in it including cyanide, but the incident became the origin of the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

Kurt Streeter’s opinion piece in The New York Times on July 29 describes the power asserted by gymnast Simone Biles when she said “no.” Ms. Biles had had enough of the pressure to perform, the abuse by team doctors and the abusive coaching by the Karolyis. We don’t know precisely why Ms. Biles decided at this moment that she had reached her tipping point. But she had.

I accidentally ran an old column again this morning. Here’s a new one.

I remember it like it was yesterday, but it was the fall of 1966.

I was a new freshman at Duke University. I had taken my first trip below the Mason-Dixon line to get there and was adjusting to the food (hush puppies and Brunswick stew), clothes (alpaca sweaters and tassel loafers), and language (drawls and y’alls). I was also adjusting to being one of the only Jews on campus.

This article by Alyssa Lukpat in The New York Times on July 19 tells a mighty sad story. Apparently people are getting lost and even dying while hiking on mountains in Europe and the United States because they arm themselves for the hike with just a smartphone. They use Google maps and other apps as guides to ascend what turn out to be dangerous hills because the trail indicated on the phone is the most direct, but not the safest and the screen on the phone is so small as to give insufficient detail for safe ascent and descent.