by R. Passov
I learned from reading Terry Donahue’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times he became head coach of UCLA’s football team in the same year I became a Bruin freshman. And we spent our formative years as neighbors but since we were 14 years apart, we never met.
Back then 14 years was a big difference. Reading he passed at 77, after having stepped away from coaching at fifty-two, surprises me. Seventy-seven is no longer a ripe old age. And, in ego-driven enterprises where success tends to breed personality cults, it’s rare to see a leader know when to go.
His many obituaries lionize his winning ways at UCLA where he led the football team in its last glory years (1976-1995), providing a salve against the pain of watching UCLA’s basketball program, once the winningest in all of college sports, fracture in the post John Wooden era. (From 1948 to 1975, Wooden coached UCLA’s men’s basketball to 10 NCAA titles. It’s been a struggle ever since.)
One of Donahue’s keys to winning can be found in his NYT obituary: “You need money, access to an aircraft if possible,” Donahue is quoted as saying before he goes on to describe the faraway places he went in search of players.
One of those faraway places was Sherman Texas where, in 1977, he found an oversized teenager who, under Friday Night Lights, was tearing up the gridiron.
Billy Don Jackson was a phenom.
One of my oldest friends, an economic historian who serves as the Academic Director of a museum of Jewish life in northern Germany, is, like me, a child of May; and, during our recent birthday month, as is our custom, we exchanged gifts by post. Since we also share a love of books and history and a taste for grand, occasionally outlandish theory, as well as an abhorrence for futuristic science fiction, the novels we sent each other were in equal measures fantastical and backward-looking: examples of counterfactual historical fiction, what has come to be known as uchronia, the imaginative remaking of a bygone era that is the temporal counterpart to utopian geography.
It wasn’t effortless but we managed to mollify, sidestep and defy enough authorities to be legally resident in Finland for the month of July. Never mind shoes and belts off and toothpaste in a plastic bag. No, do mind; do that too. But add PCR test results, Covid vaccination cards and popup, improvised airport queues. And a novel Coronavirus variant: marriage certificates on demand. 
Cancer has occupied my intellectual and professional life for half a century now. Despite all the heartfelt investments in trying to find better solutions, I am still treating acute myeloid leukemia patients with the same two drugs I was using in 1977. It is a devastating, demoralizing reality I must live with on a daily basis as my entire clinical practice consists of leukemia patients or leukemia’s precursor state, pre-leukemia. My colleagues, treating other and more common cancers, are no better off. I obsess over what I have done wrong and what the field is doing wrong collectively.
Covid-19 has led to various reactions akin to the various phases in the process of grieving. 
Many of us read with interest Ben Rhodes’ insider account of his time as a speech writer and advisor to Barack Obama during that historic presidency in his book The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House. There were suggestions of his displeasure at some aspects of US politics in that publication, as for example the racism he thought Obama was subjected to while in office. His new book After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, goes further and is a clearer articulation of his concern about US and international politics. The conclusions he draws could be viewed as a personal coming of age in his understanding of the impact of American foreign policy on the world, and indeed experiencing and confronting more realistically, the ‘darker’ angels in US domestic politics.
In 1994, Chauvet cave was discovered near the township of Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in southern France. The cave is a 
One day, I used to say to myself and anyone else who’d listen, I’m going to write a book called ‘everything you know about these people is wrong’. I have given up on the idea, and I expect anyway that someone else has already done it. What prompted the repeated thought was the way in which so little of what well known thinkers and artists did or said is actually reflected in public consciousness,
You may know everything that you need to know about the on-going “Critical Race Theory” debate. Indeed, you might have concluded that actually there is no such