On this day in Stockholm, 1923, William B Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  What is it about the Irish and literature, not to mention their outsized emotions that drive creativity?  My Mother's family, the O'Connell's, was born in Ireland, County Kerry, and came right out of central casting including a priest, a doctor, a haberdasher, and a playwright.  They immigrated to the US in the early '20s where my Mother was born and raised 7 children. She had red hair, fair skin, freckles, and a temper that you would ignore at your own peril.   Why do I bring this up during this chaotic time in American history? Because it's time to shift gears mentally and emotionally and take stock in ourselves and our backgrounds. Time to channel our unique talents toward positive ends and ignore the political detritus surrounding us. We've gone through an unprecedented period of social, political, and medical upheaval that is bound to have influenced our sense of nor...

 Wake up to the crushing wave of new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths raging across America with abandon. Be honest, we, none of us, are taking this 2nd and more deadly wave of COVID-19 as seriously as we did in March. It was then that we scrambled for home delivery services, that we self-quarantined, that we stopped church, sports, concerts, movies, bars, restaurants, and in-store shopping.  The pandemic slowed and almost stopped in places like NY, NJ, and CT. We stopped seeing our Doctor, delayed elective surgery, testing, and hospital visits. We discovered the ease and efficiency of online shopping and Zoom for family facetime. In a word, we changed our lives to preserve our physical health at the expense of our financial health. Now, what, we're entering the critical winter season when flu hits its peak, the forecast for new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are staggering and we're barely emerging from an economic recession if not a depression. The question rema...

  " a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order." Isn't four years of this enough, seriously? The constant media drumbeat, TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, dominating the headlines, the news shows, and our conversation. This did not happen by accident, this was a calculated strategy by a certified narcissist. "Narcissism:  a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others." The Trump supporters say that "this is just Trump being Trump" that, my friends, is precisely the problem. Now that he's lost the election and his sycophants in Congress have replaced their horns with silence, if not acceptance, wouldn't you think the man would suck it up, acknowledge the inevitable, exhibit a modicum of humility and devise an exit strategy that would highlight his accomplishments not feed his  addi...

# 1  NEW YORK TIMES  BESTSELLER • The author of  The Devil in the White City  and  Dead Wake  delivers an intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz—an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis One of  Chicago Tribune ’s Best Books of the Year So Far • “A bravura performance by one of America’s greatest storytellers.”—NPR “Churchill’s lessons of resilience and his style of steady-handed leadership are essential to the state of mind of American readers.”— Vanity Fair On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—...

The more things change, the more they stay the same,  “plus ça  change , plus c'est la même chose “ – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849 COVID-19 is raging across the country, case counts are setting new records day after day with deaths a lagging indicator. President-Elect Joe Biden is on course to put the nation's health #1 on his agenda with the appointment of a new commission to advise him on mitigation and containment strategy. Joe knows he's not a medical expert, much less a trained scientist, COVID is not a political issue it's a national health issue, it's an economic issue, it's a jobs issue. An election will not control COVID-19, science and leadership will.  We'll have a new administration but the same problem, what's needed is public acceptance of a strategy driven by science and common sense.  "Ah, is it just me or does anybody see The new improved tomorrow isn't what it used to be Yesterday keeps comin' 'round, it's just...

I read the news, I heard the news, I couldn't believe the news. Joe Biden, Barack O'Bama's Vice President, the Senator from Delaware, the Scranton kid from PA, the politico with 40 years of experience, the guy with friends in Congress, lots of friends, friends on both sides of the aisle, the guy who never gives up, never stops trying, never deserts his friends, that's why he has so many. The guy who never fails to take responsibility for his mistakes or fails to give credit for his successes. The guy who believes in science,  respects the medical profession, and knows that climate change is threatening the planet. The guy who knows that without defeating COVID-19 we'll never rebuild a robust economy. The guy who married a Ph.D. educator who is dedicated to both, his career and her own. Yep, that Joe Biden, the one who has been elected President of the United States with the largest and most diverse plurality in history, over seventy-four million Americans voted for ...