"The Goldberg Variations" That's what Nisa, my amazing sister-in-law said has been helping her through the past, difficult several months. It wasn't a random comment. Every Passover, over dinner, we go around …
Be well. Stay safe. Fight for justice.
Work for peace.
In April of 2020, not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began, I had an inexplicable urge to dig into my late father’s stamp collection, which had been sitting unexamined on my shelves since about 2012. I created a challenge for myself: each day find a stamp that was somehow connected to that day, write a short blurb about it, and post it on Facebook with a picture of the stamp. I thought I’d do that for a few weeks. But the pandemic continued and what started as short blurbs became a year of daily essays that not only discussed historic events, famous people, and obscure Americana but also recounted personal and family stories and examined how these decades-old stamps shed light on a host contemporary challenges. Thanks to my daughter Rebecca, every one of those 365 essays – from the early succinct ones to the later rambling ones – are collected on this website, where you can view them by date, by broad category, or by whether they were my “personal favorites.” I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Historical Figures & Events
Delving into the people and events that shaped history
Culture & Society
Exploring Americana artifacts and other obscure areas of US history
Contemporary Issues
Discussing the pandemic, 2020 politics, and other recent happenings
Personal & Family Lore
Recounting stories from my childhood, “adulthood,” and family’s history
Featured Essays
Author favorites
"Law and Order" is one of the most contentious - perhaps even one of the most noxious - political phrases of the last few decades. So I was stunned, when, …
On April 18, 2020, I wrote a short, paragraph-long Facebook post that started: "though I've had them for years, it's only in the last year that I started to look …
In 1949, my father received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Cooper Union. Seventy years later, we found his lab reports and tests in the boxes of papers, photos, …
As this #stampoftheday odyssey continues, I've learned that there are different types of days. Yesterday, I wrote about how it's sometimes challenging to find anything to write about. Other times, …
Every once in a while, the #stampoftheday marks something odd. Today is one of those days, as the #stampoftheday is a 3-cent stamp, issued on November 20, 1948, that commemorated …