Aqueduct Press released my new collection, Like Shards of Rainbow
Frolicking in the Air, on June 1, 2025, as the 96th volume in the
Conversation Pieces series. This collection includes a new story, “The
Last Nostalgia,” which I finished on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic,
and three older stories first published in the 1990s. For the second
time in my role of publisher, I’m reacting to an all-out attack on all
that I hold dear by publishing work of my own to affirm values and
ways of thinking that I share with my community of choice.
The first time I did this was in 2005. Bush II’s “Endless War” and “Christian Crusade,”
which, besides turning the entire world into its battleground, put a good portion of the US public
into a coma of stultification and rendered the Washington cognoscenti dupes who bought into and
helped propagate the administrations lies. (The New York Times’ infamous Judith Miller knowingly
fabricated lies, but I’d like to think that most of her colleagues simply succumbed to group-think.)
Twenty years later, those same people, including the top folks at the New Yorker, copped to having
been deceived without ever mentioning that a substantial minority of citizens—which included my
own community—protested the deceptions vigorously, in concert with millions of people outside
the US. It was only after the 2016 election that the “liberal media” became preoccupied with the
prevalence of misinformation and disinformation flowing ever more lavishly through Trump-world.
How could this have happened?...(read the whole essay.)
