I’d been reflecting lately with friends that as bad as the coronavirus is, one glimmer of light is that I had not yet learned of anyone in my personal orbit coming down with the disease, and more widely still, no one in all of my own friends’ and acquaintances’ orbits had either, at least to my knowledge.

But then the news that John Prine had come down with the virus and was in ICU. And now he has died.

I knew John Prine.

Well, not personally—but actually, I did! 

That’s what happens with great artists whom one pays attention to over years. They crawl in through your skin, mainline themselves right to your heart like a powerful drug, move in like an Artist-in-Residence, bestowing their gifts in an endless stream through your life.

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John Prine’s songwriting has always combined humor and pathos, mischief and solemnity, devil-may-care and tragedy in a way that not only few other artists do, b...

“May you live in interesting times” has been widely attributed to an ancient Chinese curse, though no reliable sources exist to verify that claim. Nevertheless, someone thought of and expressed the sentiment to someone else, and we owe that someone a measure of thanks as we live today through what, by any metric, meets, with absurd dark ease, the standard of “interesting times.”

I’ve found myself musing on the expression repeatedly in recent years and almost obsessively in recent weeks, as the coronavirus shoves virtually every other concern off the media wires and our own conversational threads with the people in our lives.

And as it happens, Facebook—criticized and reviled (often, with good reason) for its incursions on our privacy and cunning ability to coerce us into frittering our lives away watching endless cat and cute kid videos—has emerged as a primary conduit for those conversationa...

The best music always crawls right under your skin, raising a few goosebumps along the way as it wends its way in short order to your heart. And so it was the first time I came across Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” on an LP I picked up used in a dusty music store in Santa Monica, California just about a half-century ago.

I’d taken a music appreciation class in college, inspired partly by my mother, who grew up around classical music in her native Hungary and had exposed me to it along with Nat King Cole and a few other stalwarts of the era. So I had taken to scouring music stores to score used albums that looked intriguing enough to justify the fifty cents or dollar they would set me back.

I remember getting the Sibelius back home to play on my $99 record player (with detachable wired speakers!), and being absolutely floored by its beauty, the lush evocative melodies taking me through heights and...

“Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything was still possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible…They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”

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Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, “The Plague,” has often been described by critics as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. One can certainly read and profit from it as such, or even make it more timely today as the drama of an inept and ill-intentioned presidential administration sowing the plague of chaos and discord upon the land.

But make no mistake, “The Plague” is also very much about the real bubonic plague that has reared its head in human history over thousands of years.

The plague’s frightfulness is largely due to the approximately 50 million people it reportedly killed...

Ram Dass was an important figure for many people who came through the counterculture of the 1960-70s. Those who, having “countered” their Judeo-Christian religious upbringings, were nevertheless still seeking to anchor their world from some kind of spiritual base beyond the rampant materialism and status-seeking of modern industrialized life.

When Dass (it feels strange to refer to him by only his last name per writing protocol; it’s as if he had but one name, said in full every time: RamDass…) died just before Christmas, I noted a kind of complex but common feeling that I suspect most everyone experiences when death takes not a family member or friend but a public figure with whom we do not have a personal relationship, but who had an impact on us in the past.

The person’s death takes us back to that time—who we were and were coming to be, and how the person may have affected that becoming.

It’s...