Every year since 1990, certain types of people put themselves through the ordeal of going to Burning Man. They may come back all starry-eyed and burbling about how their lives have been transformed, but here’s what they’re usually not talking about except amongst themselves. How incredibly uncomfortable the experience can…

Gore Vidal told me — and everyone who read the book (I forget which one, I’ve read many) — how Winston Churchill revved up the powerful propaganda engine during and after The Good War to reinvent little old England as a storied and magnificent land. …

I never burned a bridge as thoroughly as the one I torched upon walking out of a job in the financial district in New York. There wasn’t so much as a pile of cinders left after I gave notice that I was leaving that job immediately via email. I didn’t…

What gives? I’m seeing state after state in This Great Country of Ours ponying up lotteries and other goodies to bribe the millions of unvaccinated people to step up and do the right thing.

HUH?!

Many states including Delaware, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, and California (California?) have set up lotteries with…

I act as if my days will go on forever. And yet, I probably check my bank balance twice daily just to keep an eye on the evaporating bit of savings I’m living on now that the government’s kicked me and 9,000,000 other people to the curb.

Remember me? I’m…

Like any hick just off the bus from Ohio, I walk around the city gazing up in amazement. Would you just look at all those windows? Every one of those windows has a room behind it. And who knows what’s going on in all those rooms behind all those windows…

We did get out of the apartment earlier, so we’re not complete shut-ins in spite of my partner’s come-again, go-again, back-again back pain and my plantar fasciitis. His back does this mean thing to him from time to time and there’s nothing for it but heating pad, pain meds, and…

“She’s worth $140 million.” My old friend and I were talking as she drove back to the city from New Jersey.

She was talking about the wife of a client she’d been working with out there. That would be the client who purchased a collapsing 18th-century farmhouse and has spent…