About “Musings & Amusings of a B-List Writer”
Years ago, I had a cartoon pasted to the file cabinet in my office. The top left drawer of the cabinet in the cartoon was labeled “A-Z.” All the other drawers were marked “Miscellaneous.” It nicely captured my mind.
I have renamed this publication. History will continue to inform what I write here. History is all-encompassing. If you’re not Ron DeSantis or another of those who want to erase “uncomfortable” aspects of the past, history includes everything that ever happened. But most people have a narrower view of the meaning of the word, so I have decided to cast a wider net than that restricted definition of history and write about Miscellaneous. though with some attempt to sort it into files in the A-Z drawer. You’ll see here whatever may interest me at a given time: social issues, politics, culture (music, film, television, etc.), language, economics, literature, art, philosophy, religion, travel, science, everyday life, the environment, education, sports, photography … the past, present and future. I’ll include humorous and satirical pieces from time to time, along with occasional snippets from my work-in-progress books.
I’m a bit dyslexic, which makes me a slow reader and a poor speller. And, while I’m fine with up or down and north or south, I have some difficulty with east or west and left or right. When I’m in a car, I always tell people if I say “right” and point left, turn in the direction I’m pointing, not the one I’m saying. I also often say, “I’m an optimist, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.” So, I focus (if that’s an appropriate word for someone with dyslexia) on the benefits of mild dyslexia. Our brains tend to mix things together, which can lead to seeing connections between things that others see as unrelated. I like that. You may see in my essays a paragraph or even a single sentence containing both Aristotle and Taylor Swift, Muhammad Ali and Mohandas Gandhi, John Maynard Keynes and George Carlin, Liz Phair and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Pointer Sisters and Gloria Steinem …
I used to think about trying to get a side gig as a newspaper columnist. What I really wanted was a way to get my thoughts and commentaries on a wide range of topics out to the public quickly, but without the pressure of deadlines for a regularly scheduled column, and without the constraints of fixed word limits.
Substack makes all that possible.
“Musings & Amusings” is, then, my irregular column of unpredictable length on miscellaneous, or in a bit of Dickens terminology I recall from reading Our Mutual Friend in my freshman year in college, “things warious.”
As was the case under the previous name, “Today through the Lens of Yesterday,” there will be no schedule for when essays appear, but they will be more frequent than they have been under the previous title. I plan to supplement new essays with some republication of my past short writings, published and unpublished (I guess the latter won’t qualify as “republications”).
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I am a writer, historian, progressive activist, feminist, traveler, and lover of film and music. I have had eleven books, including The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 and Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History, published and well over a hundred articles and op-eds in such venues as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Nation, and many others. I’m a Contributing Writer at Salon. My latest book, The Times They were a-Changin’: 1964—The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, was published by Arcade (distributed by Simon & Schuster) in 2022. I am currently working on another book exploring how the subordination of women came about and how that has misshapen history and continues to plague us in the present. The working title is “Diving Beneath the Wreck & Resurfacing,” with a subtitle of “Deep History, Masculine Insecurity, Sexism, Obscene Language & Authoritarianism.” I’m also working on a novel.
Should you want to know more about me, the Wikipedia page on me is fairly accurate. Click here for my personal website.
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