by Jeff Maisey | Apr 18, 2019 | News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham For the past year or so, my life has been marked by a series of unsettling disruptions. It all started last spring when my 15-year-old car, which I loved, finally bit the dust. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big a deal. But it turned...
by Jeff Maisey | Mar 15, 2019 | News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham Recently an old friend shared on Facebook a link to a two-year-old article in The Staten Island Advance—a paper for which I used to work—about a New York City resident who was upset by a vocabulary question on his 11-year-old daughter’s homework...
by Jeff Maisey | Feb 20, 2019 | News, News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham Two years ago, I delivered a talk at the Tidewater Community College Literary Festival called “Scenes from a White Boy’s Life,” in which I reflected on my lifelong efforts to understand “the problem of the color line,” as W.E.B Du Bois put it. I talked...
by Jeff Maisey | Jan 31, 2019 | News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham I am not going to make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience. – Ronald Reagan Now that 2019 is underway, it won’t be long before the next presidential campaign begins...
by Jeff Maisey | Dec 23, 2018 | News, News & Views, Robotham
When George H.W. Bush died, I watched with mixed feelings as pundits lionized him. I couldn’t help thinking about a book I’d read while W. was president: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips, a...
by Jeff Maisey | Nov 11, 2018 | News, News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham When it comes to food, people generally fall into two camps: those who live to eat, and those who eat to live. Those, in other words, who regard food as the greatest pleasure in life, and those who think of it as necessary fuel, in the same way that...
