Diamonds from Dunghills

This morning, I read an interesting – and disturbing – essay in the January/February 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine: “Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War, The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics” by Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron. While I have heard the term “fake news” tossed and bandied about, I was unfamiliar with the …

America Needs a Statesman

I cannot ignore the impending catastrophe our bipartisan political system has placed in our path. It is more crippling and unavoidable than any physical wall anyone could ever build…. Yesterday, I read a thought-provoking OpEd that appears in “The Atlantic” magazine, “The Suicide of a Great Democracy” by staff writer George Packer. I would have …

Observe with Passion

  I’ve not read Mary Oliver’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems American Primitive. Ms. Oliver is often compared to Emily Dickinson and her work frequently focuses on the natural world. In 2016, I read her collection of essays Upstream in which she reflects on her willingness to lose herself within the beauty and …

It’s a Wonderful Life

We first wrote and posted this six years on December 21, 2012.  Last night, December 14, 2018, Mrs. tVM and I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” just as we’ve done every Christmas season for as long as I can remember.  It always moves me in ways I can’t say much better than I did – with …

The Christmas Story

I first shared this story from Ben-Hur in December 2011, the first Christmas season of our website. Most people — certainly those younger than 60 — may only know “Ben-Hur” as a chariot race that appeared in the 1959 Academy Award-winning film starring the late Charlton Heston.  That film was telecast regularly during the holiday …