Tuesday, September 22, 2026

News and Ideas Worth Sharing

Dook Snyder

Unfortunately I’m one of the Snyders who don’t make pretzels. My Dad, Alexander’s claim to fame was seeing Carl Erskine pitch a no hitter for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field which is why he named me Dook, and in the process caused me major grief. A car mechanic, he thought he was funnier than he really was and would drag me to comedy clubs and to the Catskills. My Mom, Gail, taught second grade and treated my Dad like the second grader he often was. I work for an agency that wouldn’t be happy if I told you which one it was but know that I have come to love the Berkshires and have a second home here.

written articles

REVIEW: ‘The Threat’ offers a nuanced look at the always-complex challenges of trying to enforce law and order

Andrew McCabe has spent his life on the front lines and appreciates the stakes in a way most of us can’t. His passion is matched by his sense of urgency. It says something when some of the toughest folks in the land—FBI officials, former CIA officials—are frightened.

REVIEW: ‘Team of Vipers’ spills secrets, exacts vengeance on fellow members of King’s Court

Is it possible the professed love of God that so many tout these days is akin to a one-way street? The Sessions’ kind of religiosity that permits wrenching immigrant children from the arms of their mothers and Cliff Sims’ ability to jump aboard the Trump Train as he ignores Mr. Trump’s pussy-grabbing sexual assaults, his repeated dalliances while his wife, Melania, was pregnant. Does God actually return the personal relationship favor? I’d like to think God deserves a higher class of devotees.

Our real national emergency is in Washington, not at the border

And the rest of us will be thrust into a national emergency of conscience. For we have allowed children to be snatched from the arms of their parents and sent to inadequate holding cells, cages, transported hundreds, even thousands of miles from their loved ones to caretakers in the employ of nonprofits, men and women who don’t know the names of the villages of these children, their aunts and uncles, their neighbors, or what they love to eat for dinner.

The Trump Chronicles: Collusion, No. Conspiracy, Yes.

Let’s start with the fact, and praise be to the Times for finally using the right word, that there are too many people using the wrong word: “collusion.” The president and his odd PR attorney Rudy Giuliani insist there is no proof of capital “C” collusion.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Becoming’ shows Michelle Obama’s transcendence of bias to ultimately flourish

Michelle Robinson Obama was born, in her words, “a black working class girl” at a time when her hardworking father, tending boilers for the city of Chicago, provided a cramped apartment on the second floor of “a tidy brick bungalow” owned by her mother’s aunt on the South Side of Chicago. There, she and her brother and parents lived in a space meant for two.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Dopesick’ is a personal look at the opioid epidemic

“Dopesick” is about a drug that was sold as non-addictive, but is so incredibly addictive it is almost impossible to kick. It kills more Americans than the wars we are fighting.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘House of Trump, House of Putin,’ the plot to put a Russian operative in the White House

Unger makes several startling claims: Trump was but one of dozens of U.S. politicians and businesspeople targeted over more than 20 years who became indebted to Russia.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Full Disclosure’ by Stormy Daniels disrobes the president

For me, one of the most compelling and completely unexpected matchups we are witnessing these days is Stormy vs. the Donald. And so how appropriate would it be if their dalliance, his lies about it, and his clumsy attempts to mock and minimize and silence her bring down a president who boasted of his ability to sexually assault at will?

BOOK REVIEW: Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear,’ our plight

I found reading “Fear” to be especially painful. There were times I had to force myself to read more. It was much like watching a most terrifying movie, knowing the maniac is poised to strike at any moment. He could be behind the bathroom door or the living room couch with an axe or a chainsaw. Escape seems impossible.

‘Unhinged’: The World According to Omarosa Manigault Newman

These days we are all a bit unhinged. Omarosa Manigault Newman helps explain why.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics’ has current implications

Stephen Greenblatt has asked himself a question many of us need to ask these days: “How is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?” An accomplished scholar, Greenblatt has enlisted one of humankind’s great minds to help solve this mystery: William Shakespeare.

Smoke Signals from the Swamp: The Russians and more Russians

Thanks to special counsel Mueller’s July 13, 2018, indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers, we’ve learned in excruciating detail about the extensive hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and cyberattacks on the boards of elections of various states, and companies that supply software and other technology related to the administration of U.S. elections.

As young as one

Recently, our attention has been split by the plight of the Thai boys trapped in the cave, and the bizarre behavior of President Trump in Brussels, the United Kingdom and Helsinki. And yet there are thousands of parents and children trapped in a kind of hell, waiting to find each other.

REVIEW: ‘The Plot to Hack America,’ the untold war on American soil

We are used to the images of war: bombs and bullets and blood. But Nance knows what many Americans are unwilling to recognize: We are at war and this war is being fought on our land.

America’s new policy toward immigrants: Kids in cages, families imprisoned

This time, thankfully, the free press that our president mocks day after day as fake gave us the chance to hear firsthand from these mothers and fathers and their children, to see for ourselves the cages the children were sent to and to hear their cries.

Smoke Signals from the Swamp: Michael Cohen – the early years

Since we’re working our smoke-signal way through the supporting cast the president has surrounded himself with, it’s probably a good time to get to know the president’s private attorney. And because of the recent raid on his offices and the seizure of a massive amount of documents and some recordings, Michael Cohen’s importance in the Russian Affair and the Neverending Obstruction looms even larger.
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