Monday, February 02, 2026

Where the Words Go

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” — Willa Cather

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A few years back, one of my grandchildren mentioned that whenever she writes a story, “I let the pen go where the pen wants to go.” She was nine at the time.

It was one of the better insights I’ve learned from children.

Most writing teachers will tell you to focus on the structure of your story; they may even advise you to work from an outline. There is nothing wrong with that advice, especially for school or work assignments. But there can be downsides to having too detailed of a plan. 

Sometimes you just have to work yourself into the right mood. The one where you can just let it flow. Out there beyond where any known form of outlining can take you.

So how do you get there? Methods vary. Some people meditate. Some pour a drink (not recommended.) Some light up a joint (really not recommended, you’ll never get started.) Some nap. Some exercise. The very best way for me is to meet up with a friend. 

Sometimes it’s just listening to a child.

Anyway, once you’re writing you’ll know you’re on the right track if — to paraphrase my granddaughter — the story is going where the story wants to go, and you do too.

(Thanks to Sophia.)

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Sunday, February 01, 2026

Generational Protest



On Friday, my 12-year-old granddaughter, Daisy, was named Student of the Month and the award noted her courage.

Also on Friday, she stayed out of school in solidarity with the people protesting in Minneapolis.

For six decades, I have covered events, including demonstrations as a journalist. For the great majority of that time, I followed the code of ethics for journalists to not get involved in activities that might suggest a bias or otherwise compromise my objectivity.

When I was young and just starting out, I saw no contradiction in being a journalist and an activist at the same time. I wrote about being arrested in a civil rights demonstration, for example, in my college newspaper.

Now I am old, frail and retired. Recent events have compelled me to return to the position I held as a much younger man.

Friday afternoon, I attended an anti-ICE protest with Daisy. It is now time to be a citizen.

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Saturday, January 31, 2026

Trump's Roundup

Please visit my friend and colleague Mark Fiore’s Substack page. Here is part of his latest work, “Attacking press freedom."



Trump is arresting independent journalists in an attempt to crack down on those covering anti-ICE protests.

But resistance to ICE tactics is growing across the nation and the coverage will continue.

HEADLINES:

  • The Schoolchildren of Minneapolis (New Yorker)

  • Bay Area residents and businesses join in nationwide protests against ICE (SFC)

  • Berkeley businesses close, students protest as city joins ‘ICE Out’ national strike (Berkeleyside)

  • Bruce Springsteen sings ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ in Minneapolis as protest song hits No. 1 (NBC)

  • Noem says her response to Pretti shooting may have been wrong (Politico)

  • Justice Department says it opened civil rights investigation into Pretti’s shooting (WP)

  • ‘It’s All Just Going Down the Toilet’: Police Chiefs Fume at ICE Tactics (NYT)

  • ICE detainee’s death ruled a homicide by medical examiner (NBC)

  • Fearing ICE, Native Americans rush to prove their right to belong in the US (AP)

  • Journalist Don Lemon released from custody following his arrest in connection to Minnesota church protest (CNN)

  • Fulton County official slams 2020 ballot seizure as FBI director says there was ‘probable cause’ (ABC)

  • Warner: ‘Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an election office in Fulton County?’ (The Hill)

  • Senate Passes Spending Package but Partial Shutdown Looms (NYT)

  • US government partially shuts down despite last minute funding deal (BBC)

  • Trump names Kevin Warsh as his pick to replace Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve (CNN)

  • Rise of the Trump Loyalist (Atlantic)

  • Justice Department is releasing millions of pages of documents in Epstein investigation (CNN)

  • Trump threatens Canada with aircraft tariffs, decertification over Gulfstream approvals (CNBC)

  • Trump tightens screws on Cuba, threatening tariffs on oil suppliers (WP)

  • Map shows what would happen to Gaza under the US ‘master plan’ (Al Jazeera)

  • US military action in Iran risks igniting a regional and global nuclear cascade (The Conversation)

  • Cut off from most communication, Iranian protesters share rare stories of determination and dissent (AP)

  • MAGA’s War on Empathy (Atlantic)

  • Washington Post Plans Cuts to Reshape Newsroom (NYT)

  • In this US county, measles starts to feel like next pandemic (BBC)

  • White House Melts Down Over Bruce Springsteen’s Anti-ICE Song (Daily Beast)

  • Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age (NYT)

  • Scientists Enter a Mysterious Remote New Zealand Cave, What They Found Dates Back 1 Million Years (Daily Galaxy)

  • What technology takes from us – and how to take it back (Guardian)

  • Moltbot Gets Another New Name, OpenClaw, And Triggers Security Fears And Scams (Forbes)

  • How big a threat is AI to entry-level jobs? (Economist)

  • How the A.I. Boom Could Push Up the Price of Your Next PC (NYT)

  • Culinary Students Given Live Baby To Learn How To Care For Bag Of Flour (Onion)

LISTEN: 

Bruce Springsteen performs ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ at First Avenue solidarity show

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Friday, January 30, 2026

Dry Run(s)

(I wrote the following a year ago today. Since then, there have been multiple dry runs.)

1/30/25

One of the ways to interpret the Trump administration’s flurry of early moves is that they are part of a dry run, a test of how much chaos each pronouncement causes.

Yesterday’s sudden announcement rescinding the previous day’s freeze on all federal aid payments is a case in point. Since there was a great deal of chaos, the White House backed down — for now.

But in so doing the Trump team gained some valuable intel about how easily they can freak out the population, elected officials and the media. So now they can file those insights away for use at a future time when the specific goal may be to deliberately create chaos as part of a larger strategy involving the centralization of executive power.

Trump is set on gaining absolute power. He doesn’t care how much fear and panic his moves cause others, in fact he intends to use that fear and panic in his drive to establish himself as an autocrat. To quote Joe Biden, this is not hyperbole.

If I am reading Trump’s behavior correctly, and I believe I am, we are witnessing a dry run for how to suspend the constitution during an upcoming, unspecified national “emergency.” Trump is probing for weak spots in the government bureaucracy and testing the various levers at his disposal to see which option will best help accomplish his ultimate objective.

So that’s why it is my opinion that what we’ve seen to date is a dry run.

***

To develop an effective strategy to counteract Trump’s drive for absolute power, pro-democracy Americans need to get out in front of the firestorms he is constantly creating that are diverting public attention from his ultimate goal.

The difficulty of fighting multiple wildfires simultaneously is indeed an appropriate metaphor for what faces Democrats or anyone else in the opposition at the moment. As we saw in L.A. recently, officials could not make much progress toward containment until they could establish burn lines at the perimeters of the multiple fires and pull together huge amounts of resources from all over the place to finish the job.

What complicates this metaphor when we apply it to Trump is that he is the one setting the fires.

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Thursday, January 29, 2026

Caffeinated

There is so much we cannot control in these times that our only sensible choice is to continue (or reinstate) the small daily rituals that bring us comfort. One of these for me is drinking coffee. On certain days, I grind whole beans, filtering the grounds, and drinking the coffee black.

As I do so, I remember passing the piles of coffee beans on the side of the road in Central America and Southeast Asia. At the time I traveled there, I was gathering follow-on research from Circle of Poison, the book I wrote with Mark Schapiro.

Part of that research indicated an ugly fact: The pesticides we were researching could work their way systemically inside the coffee plant and end up as deposits in the beans -- the two flat sides of each pair nestled like a peanut inside the purplish-reddish shell.

None of the scientists we interviewed believed the tiny residues that ended up in our cups, after shelling, grinding, filtering and boiling, represented a significant health threat to coffee drinkers.

So, almost counter-intuitively, I found myself arguing in media interviews that there was no danger from drinking coffee. In fact, it had never been my intention to focus on American consumer safety. My motivation was to highlight the dangers to Third World farmworkers who sprayed those pesticides on the coffee plantations.

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and a journalistic world traveler, I'd seen many examples of these dangers, including from overhead crop dusters. On several occasions I was coated by clouds of pesticides like paraquat and malathion while doing my research; in fact I was hit by malathion so often I knew its smell.

But the unwanted chemical showers I received was nothing of consequence when stacked against the daily experience of farmworkers and their children. I was a visitor who could choose to be there and get sprayed or not.

They did not have that choice.

Over the years, there has been some progress around the world in curtailing the use of dangerous pesticides, but the syndrome we wrote about remains.

So it goes. Now I am resuming my coffee ritual, As the coffee tastes good but the memories are bittersweet.

(I first published a version of this during the pandemic.)

HEADLINES:

  • After town hall attack, Ilhan Omar condemns ‘terrorizing’ immigration push and criticism from GOP (CNN)

  • Two agents who shot Minnesota man on leave as Trump says he will ‘de-escalate’ (Guardian)

  • Greg Bovino, CPB commander who led immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, is set to leave city. Who is he, and what led to his departure? (Yahoo)

  • 2nd Amendment backlash follows portrayal of Alex Pretti by some Trump administration officials (ABC)

  • Trump tells Minneapolis mayor he’s ‘playing with fire’ if federal immigration law isn’t enforced (CNN)

  • Republicans turn on Noem, demand resignation (Axios)

  • How a low-profile Border Patrol chief became the face of Trump’s immigration policy (WP)

  • The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center (New Yorker)

  • US Fed holds interest rates despite White House pressure (BBC)

  • F.B.I. Search in Georgia Tied to Criminal Investigation Over 2020 Election (NYT)

  • Repeated government lying, warned Hannah Arendt, makes it impossible for citizens to think and to judge (The Conversation)

  • What Should Americans Do Now? (Atlantic)

  • Trump warns Iran ‘time is running out’ for nuclear deal as US military builds up in Gulf (BBC)

  • Rubio defends Trump on Venezuela while trying to allay fears about Greenland and NATO (AP)

  • Ease of Destruction (Atlantic)

  • Amazon says it is laying off 16,000 employees (TechCrunch)

  • UPS Says It Is Cutting Up to 30,000 Jobs (NYT)

  • America is leaving the WHO. It’s an act of self-sabotage. (WP)

  • HHS Wasn’t Worried About South Carolina’s Measles Outbreak. It’s Now Enormous. (Mother Jones)

  • Parkinson’s disease symptoms can show up decades before a diagnosis. (WP)

  • The WaPo Extinction Event (Puck)

  • Astronomers used AI to find 1,400 ‘anomalous objects’ from Hubble archives (Verge)

  • Replacing Factory Workers With AI Robots May Not be Cost Effective (ET)

  • The Math on AI Agents Doesn’t Add Up (Wired)

  • Clawdbot has officially changed its name for very predictable reasons (Mashable)

  • What Went Wrong With OpenAI’s Year of Agents? (The Information)

  • ICE Agent Stuffs Sock Under Mask To Give Himself Chin (Onion)

 

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Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Encounter(s)

The headlines these days are dominated by encounters, many of them unwanted, violent and deadly. While most of us watch them on screens, as opposed to in person, they still apparently provoke a similar physiological effect as they would if we were there at the scene. 

As a result, there are those who believe we are suffering from a “national trauma,” and they may be right. Not to avoid that ugly reality, but perhaps seeking a way to cope with it, I’m seeking other types of encounters these days of a more nourishing variety.

***

Yearning for balance as well as a respite from the news and the sheer weight of it all, I find comfort in walking outside, connecting with friends and gardening. Also, by reading books and long feature articles in the New Yorker.

But lately, even those options haven’t done the trick. Being retired and having too much time on my hands, I’ve somewhat guiltily turned to bingeing on melodramatic series on Netflix, like “The Diplomat,” “Virgin Spring,” and, most recently, the 2018 Korean romantic drama, “Encounter.”

I realize this may not be a genre that appeals to everybody, but what is compelling to me about “Encounter” is the sincerity and the excruciatingly slow pace of the developing love affair between a divorced hotel magnate (Song Hye-kyo) and her much younger colleague (Park Bo-gum). The characters first encounter one another by chance as strangers in a foreign land (Cuba).

In real life, Song is 12 years older than Park, but in appearance, at least by Western standards, they both could be teenagers who would probably get carded at a bar. Song has long been considered one of the most beautiful women in Korea and Park has a boyish beauty to complement hers.

Ignore the schmaltz and the soft but melodramatic soundtrack and some things lost in translation. Because both actors are superb, especially Song, whose character is layered with complexity. The pace at which the two of them get together may be glacial by Western standards, but the key to this story’s appeal is that we share this extended state of anticipation. And of course, anticipation of the romantic kind is one the most powerful emotional states we will ever experience in real life, so there’s that.

I’m guessing that the same experts I mentioned above would say that we may undergo a similar physiological response when watching such an encounter as if we were experiencing it ourselves.

In any case, even though it was vicariously, I found myself hanging on every twist and turn during this particular Encounter.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2026

The Stories to Come

One chilly morning a friend picked me up and we made our way into the city to an office where I used to work, just a couple blocks from a house where I used to live.

And although I may have felt a touch of nostalgia, this trip was not about the past but the future. Our purpose was to meet with a small group of young people just launching their new careers as journalists.

As is expected from an old guy, I told a few war stories, but we focused much more on their stories, especially the ones yet to be written. In this meeting, we were joined by other veterans of the news business, citing experiences from between ten and twenty years each.

I hesitated to bring up that I broke into journalism 60 years ago this month, so as not to appear to give my length of time more weight than it deserves.

After all, regardless of how long you do this, or how many thousands of stories you write, your entire career may well boil down to a few moments and a set of circumstances beyond your control.

And it’s how you apply the knowledge you gain from those few moments that can make all the difference.

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