Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Berliners’ love for animals – especially dogs – has long since become legendary in this country.  Most recently this city-state has gone stark, raving mad over a polar bear cub, rejected by his mother at birth and bottle-fed every two hours by an Ersatz mother named Thomas Dörflein, a personable staff employee of western Berlin’s [...]

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  “The New Yorker”, for me during my first several decades on earth the finest publication in the entire world and in recent years once again for me at least one of the finest, has now weighed in with its customary sylish grace, expertise, and authority on the continuing brouhaha about Sen. Craig’s apparently endless [...]

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My psychoanalytic avocation (a total of seven years of institutional post-analysis “informatory” training – in American terms seminar-auditing – at two of Berlin’s leading psychoanalytic institutes) has coincidentally just led me to stumble upon a paper by the New York psychoanalyst Jack Drescher, M.D., printed in the professional publication Psychiatric Times, and indirectly relevant to [...]

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Fellow codgers here will recall perhaps the first genuinely great American television journalist, the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Edward R. Murrow, whose numerous accomplishments probably hit their highest point when he single-handedly reversed the ultra-reactionary direction the USA had taken in mortal fear of that era’s villainous junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.  With his customary [...]

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Earlier this week I inadvertently frustrated gambolers in this rumpus room by dangling before you a link to an extraordinary television clip some schmuck evidently zapped out of existence by the time most of you tried to see it.  It showed this fireball angeleña psychologist in full extemporaneous cry as participant in a panel discussion [...]

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I’d intended to write something quite different this time (in essence: about the almost innumerable subtly nuanced little psychological surprises and “gotchas!” directly connected with my recent naturalization as a German citizen), but into my lap this morning dropped this tasty tidbit of sexual esoterica – and who could possibly resist passing it on to [...]

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Herewith the text of an email I’ve just given maximum distribution worldwide: After my broadcasting that link – and testing it to make certain that it did indeed still work – an early-rising Washingtonian emailed me the equivalent of “What clip?” Rosalyn Bloch’s original email from Brentwood, in which she had thoughtfully made it available [...]

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Rosalyn Bloch, an angeleña psychoanalyst friend of mine,  has made my morning by dropping into my lap an astonishing videoclip extracted from an apparent panel discussion on the maverick Arab television station Al Jazeera – based in the tiny emirate of Qatar (pop. 841,000 – placing it in 158th place worldwide), but because of its [...]

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I’d never at all thought very much about that small provincial northwestern city, and in recent years not at all until a few days ago when Sen. Larry Craig inadvertently catapulted it onto every front page in all fifty United States.  I knew that the word Boise tugged at my memory in some obscure way [...]

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From this morning’s New York Times, this much as a teaser: Multimillionaire Dog Can’t Buy Herself a Friend By MANNY FERNANDEZ     She has a thing for cream cheese and long walks in the park.  Like many New Yorkers, she is well fed, well groomed and well medicated (for her thyroid and kidney troubles).  At [...]

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