Len Zwelling

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.

Maureen Dowd always calls them as she sees them. She’s been one of my favorite columnists for years and her piece in The New York Times on Sunday, July 18 demonstrates why her work is of such importance.

Mimi Swartz is the executive editor of Texas Monthly and is based in Houston. Richard Parker is an author writing about the Southwest. They both had opinion pieces in The New York Times on July 15 about the great state of Texas and how the political agenda of the Texas GOP has veered the state off course.

If you can’t win a political argument, I guess you can run away. That’s what the Democrats in the Texas State Legislature decided to do to avoid the passage of the voter suppression legislation pushed by Republican legislators and Governor Abbott. Abbott is furious that the Dems left and broke the needed quorum in the state legislature. My guess is that he will deploy the Department of Public Safety to arrest and jail the Democrats when they return home and then call another special session of the legislature until he gets what he wants.