Before my mind was turned to the subject of my title, I started to write a piece called “Are the Dead Nostalgic?” It’s a touchy philosophical question that has...

“Every time I ask what time it is, I get a different answer” Henny Youngman I don’t know about you, but I find some movies useful and even entertaining...

“He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.” William Blake, Eternity “But...

I’m easily old enough to be your father, and as I was watching and rooting for you when you missed those putts earlier today at The U.S. Open, I...

Edward Curtin “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief...

Edward Curtin I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist.  I wonder why.  It is my birthday.  The first...

Edward Curtin “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus Really?  Or was he...

Edward Curtin My title comes from a song sung by soldiers as they marched to hell in the trenches of World War I and the same song my sisters and I...

Edward Curtin Sixty years ago in the late fall and early winter, a seventeen-year-old blue-eyed Bronx boy went by himself to see an afternoon showing of West Side Story...

Edward Curtin It’s hard to say where things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins....

Edward Curtin Something is happening here, But you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones? Bob Dylan, Ballad of A Thin Man It’s hard… Life today seems...

John Steppling Some books demand slower reading than others. Ed Curtin’s new book is such a case. But then this assemblage of essays, many published elsewhere, is a corrective...

Walk the streets in the United States and many countries these days and you will see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons, masked and anonymous, whose eyes look...

Edward Curtin Imagine this: A so-called presidential historian for a major television network publishes an interview in the most famous newspaper in the world with the most famous singer/songwriter...

Edward Curtin I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as “the Houdini of the Hardwood,” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I...

Edward Curtin And all the news just repeats itself Like some forgotten dream we’ve both seen” John Prine, Hello in There Without the ability to forget, we become imprisoned...

Edward Curtin For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.” Hamlet On May 1, 1962, President John Kennedy was meeting in the Oval Office...

Edward Curtin Like many people, when the New Year rolls around, I think of turning over a new leaf. The problem with doing that, especially in New England, is...

The lobby of the temple of time travel called the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts was suffused with a nostalgic vibe tinged with the whiff of encroaching death...

It is a dastardly habit no sane person should inflict on oneself. To rise from one’s night dreams and step into a litany of hyperbolic headlines shouting...