Selected Writings
In 30 years in New York City journalism, I wrote or edited stories about practically every facet of city life -- from the joys to the horrors. In recent years I've weighed-in on topics ranging from an attack on the New York subways to Donald Trump's failure to make himself into a wartime president, to the wacky history of one of my favorite movies.
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Here are just some of my essays and stories that have appeared in The New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and Military History Quarterly, to name a few.
Time has a way of burnishing stories and smoothing over the rough edges, of pulling legends and heroes out of horrors. When newspaper articles remember that day, as they have rather more often since Sept. 11, the writers often describe a heroic effort to save Stephen by doctors who worked until dawn. Barbara Lewnes, reading her newspaper in Snooky's on a chilly afternoon, remembers it differently.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.
ChatGPT cannot feel or taste or smell. It can’t listen or see or play the piano. It cannot run or trip or climb a ladder or eat sushi. It cannot love or hate or hold a baby or go deep-sea diving or play shortstop. It cannot admire a Vermeer. It cannot do any of those things so, therefore, it cannot describe them as they truly are, and as they truly are different to everyone who experiences them. But writers can.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was a big deal at the time, and it is generally considered the first modern war. The world watched with rapt attention. In the story of this conflict, we can find clues to what is happening, and what may still happen, in Vladimir Putin’s misbegotten and bloody invasion of Ukraine. The Japanese navy’s destruction of the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the planet, shocked the world in 1905 as much as Ukrainian missiles’ sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva.
The subways are the great equalizer of the great city. Bosses and workers, riders of all genders and ethnicities, cram together, or at least they did before COVID. Some lines are like journeys around the world, every stop a new country. As teenagers we took dates on the subways; afterwards, we rode home on them, elated or dejected.
![[Logo] HistoryNet](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/2f75fa_960e7e043d8e4ce88923e6198666db53~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_291,h_67,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/2f75fa_960e7e043d8e4ce88923e6198666db53~mv2.png)
This was not only a motion picture that went to extraordinary effort and expense to portray history as it was—down to using exact quotes in dialogue—but a film that managed to deepen two formerly warring nations’ understanding of a seminal event in their messy shared histories. It helped heal the lightly scabbed wounds of the Pacific War while also portraying the Japanese people far more honorably and through a far less racist lens than the vast majority of Hollywood films that had preceded it.
The Glorious and its escorts had been caught while returning to Scapa Flow in Scotland following England’s failed bid to save Norway in the early days of the war. In the rock-paper-scissors game of that era’s naval warfare, aircraft carriers reigned supreme—until they came under the guns of an enemy battleship, in which case they were utterly helpless.