Category: General

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Is Southern Hospitality Real? Notes From I-95

After driving up I-95 from South Florida toward Washington, D.C., somewhere between the boiled-peanut signs, the billboards promising salvation, and the exits containing more Waffle Houses than seems mathematically possible, I began wondering:

Is Southern hospitality actually real?

I think it might be.

This conclusion wasn’t reached at a Charleston garden party or over mint juleps on the veranda of an antebellum mansion. It came from the more reliable laboratory of American culture: restaurants, candy stores, hotel elevators and random encounters with people who had absolutely no reason to talk to us.

Brunswick, Georgia

Our first evidence came in Brunswick, Georgia, where we stopped for lunch at Indigo Shanty.

The food itself was worth getting off I-95 for—creative Southern cooking with enough personality to remind you that the interstate exit signs do not constitute a representative sample of American cuisine.

And then there was dessert.

Georgia Peach Pound Cake.

Who knew?

I’ve spent decades eating desserts and had somehow missed the possibility that peaches and pound cake might constitute one of civilization’s great achievements. It was one of those desserts where the first bite makes everyone at the table stop talking briefly—a considerable accomplishment in our family.

But what I remember almost as much as the food was our waitress.

She didn’t merely take our order and disappear. We started talking. She told us that her family had lived in the area for generations—going all the way back to colonial times.

Colonial times!

In South Florida, someone who arrived in 1987 is considered a pioneer.

A patron joined the conversation. Later, we wandered into a candy store and started talking with the owner. Again, there was no apparent objective to any of this. Nobody was networking. Nobody was collecting followers. Nobody glanced at a phone after 23 seconds to indicate that our allotted social-interaction period had expired.

They just talked to us.

Warmly. Curiously. Naturally.

It felt different.

Then came Florence

We stopped overnight in Florence, South Carolina, at a Hampton Inn.

There, Kathy and I got into an elevator with an older gentleman.

Now, in New York, the universally understood rules of elevator behavior are fairly straightforward:

Enter.

Face forward.

Study the floor numbers with extraordinary concentration.

Do not acknowledge that you and three other mammals are temporarily confined inside a steel box.

This gentleman apparently had not received the memo.

We started talking.

It turned out he served on the local school board and had just come from a meeting organizing a program at the local schools designed to help students develop specialized skills and give opportunities to students who might otherwise be disadvantaged.

By the time the elevator doors opened, we weren’t discussing the weather. We were talking about education, opportunity and how schools can identify abilities in children whose circumstances might otherwise prevent those abilities from being recognized.

Think about that.

We got onto an elevator expecting transportation between floors.

We got off having had a conversation about American education policy.

At a Hampton Inn.

That’s when I began to suspect that Southern hospitality might be more than an advertising campaign.

Maybe Southern hospitality really does exist

There is certainly mythology involved.

The South has spent generations cultivating an image of porches, sweet tea, “yes ma’am,” neighbors bringing casseroles and strangers asking where you’re from.

But stereotypes sometimes originate from observable cultural differences.

In much of the South, particularly in smaller cities and towns, conversation with strangers still seems to be considered normal social behavior.

Eye contact isn’t necessarily an invasion of privacy.

A question isn’t necessarily an interrogation.

And telling someone you’ve never met something about yourself doesn’t require first accepting their LinkedIn invitation.

Compare that with a large Northeastern city.

Try standing on a Manhattan sidewalk and asking a passing stranger:

“So, where are y’all from?”

You may learn several colorful new expressions, none traditionally associated with hospitality.

This doesn’t mean New Yorkers are unfriendly. Quite the contrary. If you collapse on Lexington Avenue, six people will probably help you before the ambulance arrives.

But if you’re standing perfectly upright and appear healthy, they expect you to keep moving.

The New York social contract is:

I’ll help you if you need me. Otherwise, don’t block the sidewalk.

The Southern version seems closer to:

We’ve got two minutes. Why shouldn’t we talk?

Why?

Climate probably contributes.

For generations, warm weather encouraged more social life to occur outside—on porches, sidewalks, church steps, front yards and town squares. People saw one another.

But climate can’t explain everything.

Miami is warm.

Nobody has ever merged onto I-95 in Miami and thought, What a delightful expression of communal warmth.

Population density matters. Pace matters. Smaller communities create repeated interactions. You encounter acquaintances, neighbors and people who know people you know. Reputation becomes a form of social currency.

Religion probably matters too.

Drive long enough through Georgia and South Carolina and you discover that Christianity is not exactly keeping a low profile.

Jesus competes vigorously with personal-injury lawyers for billboard space.

Churches historically served not only as places of worship but as centers of community life. Greeting strangers, asking about families, feeding visitors, helping neighbors and making newcomers feel welcome became behaviors reinforced generation after generation.

And then there’s the complicated part

Southern hospitality also exists alongside a much darker Southern history.

The mythology of the gracious South—good manners, gallantry, hospitality, the gracious host on the veranda—became entangled after the Civil War with romanticized memories of the Old South and the Confederacy.

That mythology could describe a society as genteel and courteous while ignoring the rather enormous question:

Hospitable to whom?

Slavery, Jim Crow and racial violence coexist uneasily with the romantic image of Southern graciousness.

But that doesn’t make the friendliness of a waitress in Brunswick today artificial.

Cultures inherit traditions from complicated histories and transform them. A social custom doesn’t have to endorse everything about the society in which it originated.

And the Florence encounter struck me as particularly interesting in that context.

Here was an older Southern man, serving on a school board, enthusiastically talking to two complete strangers about helping disadvantaged students acquire specialized skills and opportunities.

Whatever the origins of Southern social customs, cultures don’t remain frozen in 1861.

Dolly understood this

Then there’s Dolly Parton.

Dolly possesses perhaps the purest modern version of Southern charm.

She somehow gives millions of people the impression that if they happened to sit beside her at a diner, she’d actually want to hear about their grandchildren.

Her warmth isn’t naïveté. She’s funny, perceptive and perfectly capable of delivering a sharp line. But she wraps intelligence in friendliness rather than using intelligence to establish distance.

That feels distinctly Southern.

And think about several modern presidents raised in the South.

Jimmy Carter had the Georgia smile and Sunday-school manner. Bill Clinton became famous for his appetite for personal interaction—the political equivalent of the man at the barbecue who somehow remembers the names of your children three years later. George W. Bush practiced the Texas variation: nicknames, informality, jokes and the impression that he’d rather be talking over barbecue than standing behind a lectern.

Three very different presidents with very different politics.

Yet each understood an important Southern social instinct:

Make the other person comfortable before expecting him to listen to you.

It’s an effective human skill.

Not surprisingly, it’s also an effective political one.

But is it sincere?

Probably about as sincere as any deeply learned cultural behavior.

A New Yorker isn’t necessarily angry when he says, “C’mon, buddy, move.”

And a Southerner isn’t necessarily offering lifelong friendship when she calls you “honey.”

Culture gives us scripts.

The interesting part is what happens after the script.

In Brunswick and Florence, people kept talking.

The waitress told us about generations of her family.

The candy-store owner lingered in conversation.

The man in the Hampton Inn elevator told us about his schools and the children he hoped they could help.

Nobody was trying to sell us anything. Nobody knew us. We were simply two travelers who would probably be back on I-95 the next morning.

Yet they invested a few minutes in us anyway.

That felt real.

The I-95 experiment

Maybe one of the best ways to understand America is not to fly over it.

Drive through it.

Get off I-95.

Ignore the interstate landscape of identical gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Stop in Brunswick. Spend the night in Florence. Walk into a locally owned store. Ask somebody a question that can’t be answered with yes or no.

You’ll pass signs advertising pecans, boiled peanuts, fireworks and eternal salvation.

Eventually somebody will start talking to you.

Not networking.

Not posting.

Not texting.

Talking.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll learn something about a family that’s been in Georgia since colonial times.

Or about a South Carolina school trying to give disadvantaged kids opportunities they might otherwise never have.

Or about the person standing next to you in an elevator.

And occasionally you’ll learn something truly important:

Georgia Peach Pound Cake is magnificent.

For a country increasingly populated by people staring silently into six-inch screens, perhaps the most appealing thing about Southern hospitality isn’t that it’s Southern.

It’s that it’s hospitality.

Somewhere between Brunswick and Florence, I realized how much I had missed it.

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Forbidden Love in the Pleistocene: When Homo sapiens Met the Neanderthals

It begins with a few suspicious snippets of DNA.

They sit quietly inside our chromosomes—genetic heirlooms from ancestors whose names have been forgotten and whose family photographs were never taken because photography would not be invented for another 50,000 years. Europeans and Asians commonly carry about 1–2 percent Neanderthal DNA. Some populations in Oceania possess an additional helping of Denisovan ancestry.

Clearly, something happened.

Officially, scientists call it archaic admixture. But let us dispense with the laboratory euphemisms. Our ancestors were sleeping with the neighbors.

These were the original fusion families—and one suspects they generated considerable gossip around the communal fire.

“Did you hear about Oona?”

“No.”

“She’s seeing a Neanderthal.”

“The one with the brow ridge?”

“They all have brow ridges, Mabel.”

Out of Africa—and Into an Awkward Reception

Early Homo sapiens did not simply leave Africa once in a single triumphant parade. There appear to have been earlier excursions into the Middle East and Eurasia, followed later by the major expansion—roughly 60,000 to 70,000 years ago—that produced most of the ancestry of people living outside Africa today.

So, in broad terms, we were out of Africa more than once. The first expeditions may have faded away or contributed little to later populations. The later travelers were more successful, although “successful” is a generous term for people crossing deserts on foot without maps, luggage, antibiotics or a decent airport lounge.

When Homo sapiens entered Neanderthal territory, they encountered people who had already survived hundreds of thousands of years of European winters. Neanderthals were powerfully built, technologically capable and remarkably well adapted to cold climates.

The newcomers were probably not greeted with gift baskets.

From the Neanderthal perspective, these skinny tropical immigrants must have looked poorly equipped:

“Look, Urg. More sapiens.”

“They’ll never last the winter.”

“They’re wearing shells as jewelry.”

“Pretentious.”

The Neanderthals were the hearty locals—the prehistoric equivalent of people who shovel snow in shorts. Homo sapiens, by comparison, arrived with narrower bodies, complicated social networks and an irritating tendency to keep moving into neighborhoods where nobody had invited them.

The First Culture War

It is tempting to imagine sapiens proudly unveiling their latest technological achievement.

“Behold—a finely shaped stone blade!”

The Neanderthal examined it.

“You spent all afternoon making that?”

“It has a symmetrical edge.”

“It’s a rock, Kevin.”

Both Neanderthals and modern humans made sophisticated tools. Neanderthals also used pigments, collected unusual objects and may have created symbolic markings or art of their own. The old caricature of the stupid, shambling caveman has not aged well.

Still, cultural rivalry must have been irresistible.

When sapiens began decorating caves with horses, bison and handprints, conservative Neanderthal critics may have complained that the work lacked realism.

“The bison’s legs are completely out of proportion.”

“It’s symbolic.”

“It’s rubbish. And now there’s ochre all over the wall.”

A Neanderthal father might have watched his daughter admire a sapiens artist and muttered, “He calls himself a painter, but he still lives in a cave.”

Love Across the Species Line

We do not know whether prehistoric groups disapproved of interbreeding. No Pleistocene advice columns survive, and archaeology has yet to uncover a stone tablet reading, “Over my dead body will you marry a Denisovan.”

Indeed, the word species becomes rather slippery here. Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans were distinct populations, but they could have fertile offspring. Whether we call them separate species, subspecies or humanity’s extremely distant regional cousins depends partly on how we define species.

Whatever terminology we choose, their DNA tells us the relationships occurred repeatedly.

The courtship process remains unknown.

Perhaps sapiens males impressed Neanderthal women with beads, music and long-distance trade networks. Perhaps Neanderthal males impressed sapiens women by lifting an entire elk without bending their knees.

One imagines the parental objections:

“He’s not our kind.”

“He’s thoughtful.”

“He has no chin.”

“That’s superficial.”

“He lives beyond the third glacier!”

“I love him.”

“Oh, wonderful. Mixed children. What will the mammoths say?”

Yet the children survived. Some had children of their own. Their genetic traces traveled through thousands of generations and now influence aspects of immunity, skin biology, metabolism and disease susceptibility.

Every family has secrets. Ours are encoded in base pairs.

The Denisovan Scandal

Denisovans are even more mysterious. We know them largely from DNA extracted from a few bones and teeth found in Asia. They left far fewer recognizable fossils than Neanderthals, yet their genetic legacy survives strongly in some populations, particularly in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Oceania.

Denisovan ancestry also contributed useful adaptations. One famous example is a version of the EPAS1 gene that helps Tibetans function at high altitude.

Thus, an ancient liaison with Denisovans eventually enabled people to live comfortably where sea-level visitors become breathless carrying a sandwich upstairs.

Evolution is nothing if not practical.

The Denisovans themselves had apparently interbred with even older, unidentified archaic humans—a “ghost population” that may have been related to Homo erectus or another ancient lineage.

This means Denisovans were criticizing their children’s romantic choices while concealing archaic entanglements of their own.

“You cannot marry a sapiens!”

“But Grandmother says your side of the family has erectus DNA.”

“Grandmother talks too much.”

We have no direct genetic proof that Homo erectus interbred with modern humans. But genetic studies suggest that some Denisovan ancestors mated with a very ancient human lineage. If that lineage was Homo erectus or something similar, then the prehistoric family tree was less a tree than a hedge after several glasses of wine.

Homo erectus: The Original Wanderer

Long before modern humans began congratulating themselves for leaving Africa, Homo erectus had already done it—perhaps nearly two million years ago.

They spread across enormous distances and survived far longer than our species has existed so far. If longevity were the measure of evolutionary success, Homo erectus could look at Homo sapiens and say, “Call me when you’ve made it past the million-year mark.”

Whether erectus engaged in genetic unfaithfulness with later human groups remains uncertain. But considering the record of every human population for which we possess DNA, the safest conclusion is that when two hominin groups met, they sometimes fought, sometimes exchanged technology and occasionally exchanged phone numbers—metaphorically speaking, since the Pleistocene cellular network was terrible.

The Shame of the Fusion Family

Did mixed families experience prejudice? Possibly, but we cannot know. Small hunter-gatherer groups depended heavily on cooperation, and outsiders could be regarded as competitors, allies, trading partners or potential spouses. A newcomer’s ancestry probably mattered less than whether he could find water, butcher an animal and refrain from attracting hyenas.

Still, one can imagine the social discomfort.

At the annual solstice gathering, a mixed sapiens-Neanderthal family arrives.

The children are robust, clever and slightly hairier than average.

Everyone tries not to stare.

A sapiens aunt whispers, “They have his brow ridge.”

The Neanderthal grandmother replies, “At least they have shoulders.”

Then the children demonstrate a better hunting technique, decorate the cave and survive the next epidemic. Within a few generations, everybody has forgotten why the match was controversial.

That is the great joke hidden in our DNA: the supposedly improper unions were not evolutionary mistakes. Some produced descendants who were better adapted to local diseases, climates and environments.

The scandal became an advantage.

We Are All the Result of Questionable Decisions

Eventually, Neanderthals disappeared as a distinct population. Denisovans vanished from the visible archaeological record. Other human lineages faded as well. Some were displaced, some absorbed and some probably succumbed to combinations of climate change, small population size, competition and plain bad luck.

But they did not disappear completely.

They survive inside us—in immune responses, skin traits, metabolic quirks and tiny stretches of chromosomes passed down from lovers who met tens of thousands of years ago.

We like to tell human evolution as a heroic story in which Homo sapiens marched out of Africa, defeated inferior rivals and inherited the Earth through superior intelligence.

The DNA tells a messier and much more entertaining story.

We wandered out of Africa in multiple waves. We met people who looked different from us. We competed with them, borrowed from them and had children with them. Some families were undoubtedly appalled. Some neighbors probably gossiped. A few fathers sat silently in the corner sharpening hand axes.

And yet the children endured.

So the next time someone complains about intermarriage, cultural mixing or newcomers entering the neighborhood, remind them that human beings have been upsetting the in-laws since the Ice Age.

Then show them their genome.

There is probably a Neanderthal in it, quietly raising one enormous eyebrow.

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The Cookie I Chased for 70 Years: Found Me On My Birthday

This post is rewritten to reflect recent developments:

Some people chase fame, fortune, or the fountain of youth. Me? I chase black-and-white cookies. Not just a black-and-white cookie—I’m talking about the black-and-white cookie. This is less a hobby and more a lifelong pursuit—part nostalgia, part stubbornness, and part refusal to accept mediocrity in baked goods.

My journey has taken me from childhood bakeries that no longer exist…to modern-day pilgrimages that occasionally end in heartbreak. (More on that Florida debacle later.) But every once in a while, just when the trail seems cold, something unexpected happens.

Like this year—on my 73rd birthday—when the cookie found me.

A Love Letter to the Black-and-White Cookie

Let’s get one thing straight: the black-and-white cookie is not a cookie. It’s a cake wearing a cookie costume.

Soft. Slightly domed. Tender but not flimsy. And topped with that signature half-and-half glaze—vanilla on one side, chocolate on the other—like a dessert that couldn’t decide and wisely chose both.

The icing is where greatness lives or dies. It should be thin, almost fondant-like—not a slab of sugary drywall. The vanilla side should be clean and bright. The chocolate side should taste like cocoa, not compromise.

No sprinkles. No fillings. No nonsense.

This is not dessert innovation. This is dessert perfection.

For me, it’s more than food. It’s memory. It’s New York. It’s childhood. It’s a time when bakeries smelled like sugar and promise, and one cookie could make your entire day.

A Bite of History

The black-and-white cookie has been around for over a century, which already gives it more staying power than most things on the internet.

Often associated with New York, its origins are debated. Some credit Bavarian immigrants. Others point to Glaser’s Bake Shop, which opened in 1902 and helped define the form before closing in 2018—an event that should have warranted citywide mourning.

Screenshot

Jewish bakeries and delis carried the torch, turning the black-and-white into an icon. Even Seinfeld weighed in, famously declaring it a symbol of harmony.

I’ll leave the philosophy to Jerry. I’m here for the icing.

The One That Got Away: Adventurers Inn

Every obsession has its origin story. Mine involves a now-defunct amusement park in Queens: Adventurers Inn.

They didn’t just serve black-and-whites. They served a double-decker version.

Two layers. Twice the cake. Twice the icing. A structural achievement that should have required an engineering permit.

As a kid, I stared at it like it was edible mythology. And then—like all great childhood institutions—Adventurers Inn disappeared, taking my beloved double-decker with it.

I’ve been chasing that ghost ever since.

The Delray Beach Debacle

Fast forward to recent times. I hear whispers of greatness at Boy’s Farmers Market. Naturally, I go.

The bakery counter was five people deep. Not a line—a contact sport.

Elbows were deployed. Orders barked. Boxes clutched like lottery winnings.

I hovered. I strategized. I briefly considered a pick-and-roll maneuver.

But in the end? I walked away. No cookie. Just dignity… and a growing suspicion that the best black-and-white in Florida was five feet away and completely inaccessible without shoulder pads.

Still, if it’s that crowded, they’re doing something right.

The Birthday Surprise (When the Cookie Found Me)

And then—just when I least expected it—came my 73rd birthday.

No bakery pilgrimage. No crowded counters. No tactical maneuvering required.

Instead, my son’s mother-in-law—clearly a woman of exceptional judgment—had scoured the internet, found a recipe, and showed up with a batch of homemade black-and-white cookies.

What I walked into was less a kitchen and more a cookie workshop in full swing.

Rows of freshly baked cookies. Bowls of icing. Spatulas in motion. It had the feel of a family-run bakery—only warmer, livelier, and a lot more fun.

And then came the grandkids.

My granddaughter and grandson stepped right into the process with complete enthusiasm. They helped spread icing, sampled along the way, and brought a level of joy and energy that no professional bakery could ever replicate.

The cookies took on a little personality—some with a bit more chocolate, some with a bit more vanilla—but each one felt like it had a story behind it.

It was exactly how baking should be.

The cookies themselves? Genuinely excellent. Soft, balanced, with icing that captured the spirit of a true black-and-white.

But more importantly, they had something no bakery can reliably produce:

They had occasion.

The Search Continues

So here I am. Still chasing the perfect black-and-white cookie.

Maybe it’s in a hidden bakery.
Maybe it’s in a deli that hasn’t changed since 1975.
Maybe somewhere, somehow, a double-decker is waiting for its comeback tour.

But now I know something I didn’t before.

Sometimes the best version isn’t the one you chase.

Sometimes it’s the one that shows up—on your 73rd birthday—made in a busy kitchen, shared with family, and brought to life by a couple of enthusiastic young assistants who understand, instinctively, that dessert is supposed to be fun.

And frankly, they’re absolutely right.

The quest continues.

But for one day at least?

I caught it.

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The Colonoscope in the Park

Seven years into retirement, I assumed I had successfully left gastroenterology behind.

Apparently my subconscious did not get the memo.

The dream began normally enough. I was back in an endoscopy suite performing a colonoscopy—something I had done thousands of times over the course of my career. The setting felt completely authentic: the soft hum of equipment, the glowing monitor, the familiar choreography of scope, suction, insufflation, and gentle navigation through the turns of the colon.

Then I saw it.

A polyp.

Even in my dream I was pleased. Muscle memory kicked in immediately. The snare went out, the polyp was captured cleanly, and I dropped it neatly into the retrieval basket. A textbook polypectomy.

At that point I looked up.

I was no longer in the endoscopy center.

I was standing in a park.

The colonoscope was still in my hands. The basket still contained the polyp. But the patient had completely vanished, as had the endoscopy suite. No nurse, no monitor, no stretcher—just me, the scope, and what appeared to be a perfectly pleasant public park.

Dream logic, as usual, provided no explanation.

I remember thinking: Well, this is unusual.

The next scene shifted again. Now I was back in the endoscopy center, but the situation had somehow become worse. The patient had apparently gotten up and left. The room was empty. I was standing there holding a colonoscope and a specimen basket with a polyp that seemed to belong to no one.

And I was thinking: What exactly am I supposed to do now?

Do I call pathology?

Do I track down the patient?

Do I go back to the park and see if he’s still there?

This was the precise moment I woke up.

Later that same day I spoke with a 90-year-old retired radiologist. He practiced for decades and read thousands upon thousands of studies during his career.

He told me something interesting.

He still dreams about radiology.

Not just occasionally—frequently. In his dreams he’s interpreting films, attending departmental meetings, or planning new hospital ventures. He hasn’t practiced in years, but the machinery of the profession keeps running somewhere in the back of his mind.

Apparently the professional brain never fully powers down.

The whole thing reminded me of another type of dream that many of us have had since our student days.

The classic academic nightmare.

You’re suddenly sitting in a final exam. The room is silent. The test is handed out. And then you realize—with a sinking feeling—that you never attended the class all semester. You don’t recognize the material. You don’t know the subject. You may not even know what course you’re taking.

Yet somehow you are expected to pass the final.

For decades that dream would occasionally pop up in my sleep. It’s the brain’s way of replaying the anxiety of responsibility long after the actual responsibility has disappeared.

My colonoscopy-in-the-park dream felt like the medical version of that exam nightmare.

Somewhere in my subconscious I am still responsible for the polyp.

Medicine leaves deep grooves in the brain. When you spend forty years making decisions, solving problems, and being responsible for other people’s outcomes, those patterns become part of the architecture of the mind.

You may retire.

But the brain occasionally clocks back in.

Sometimes that means interpreting radiology films at age ninety. Sometimes it means taking an exam for a class you never attended.

And sometimes it means standing in a park holding a colonoscope and a very nicely retrieved polyp—wondering where the patient went.

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The Lost Language of the Chart-Toppers: Why Bad Bunny Frustrates a Monolingual America

If you scroll through the comments of any major music publication today, you’ll find a recurring grievance: “Why is the biggest artist in the world singing in a language I don’t understand?” Bad Bunny’s refusal to “crossover” into English has become a cultural flashpoint. To some, it’s a triumphant display of Latino pride; to others, it’s a barrier to entry that feels alienating. But if we look back sixty or seventy years, the American listener was actually far more comfortable with a polyglot playlist than we are today.

What changed? It might be that we’ve lost the “shared trauma” that once forced us to look outward.

When the World Was on the Radio

In the 1950s and 60s, Americans didn’t just tolerate foreign-language hits; they celebrated them. Consider the landscape:

• Domenico Modugno’s “Volare” (1958): An Italian ballad that spent five weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the first-ever Grammy for Record of the Year.

• Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” (1963): A Japanese torch song that reached #1 despite the fact that most listeners had no idea it was actually a melancholy poem about walking to keep from crying.

• Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba”: A traditional Mexican huapango that became an indelible part of the early rock-and-roll DNA.

Even Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera,” while primarily English, leaned into its Spanish title as a universal mantra. Back then, the American ear was conditioned to find beauty in the melody, even when the vocabulary remained a mystery.

The Military Connection: A Global Perspective

There is a compelling argument that this mid-century musical tolerance was forged in the fires of World War II. After a global conflict that left 60 million dead, the world was irrevocably interconnected.

Millions of young American GIs were deployed to Europe and the Pacific. They weren’t just tourists; they were young people living in German villages, Italian cities, and Japanese occupied territories. They ate the food, heard the radio, and brought those sounds home in their kit bags.

This created a “globalized” generation. They had seen the wreckage of isolationism and, through sheer military exposure, developed a cultural elasticity. To a veteran who had spent two years in Naples, an Italian ballad on the radio didn’t feel like a “foreign intrusion”—it felt like a memory.

The Modern Divide: No Shared Experience

Contrast that with the environment that greets Bad Bunny today. Today’s United States lacks that unifying, outward-facing experience. We are more “connected” via the internet, but more “siloed” in our consumption.

• Algorithmic Bubbles: We only hear what we already like.

• The Lack of National Service: There is no longer a massive, cross-cultural “melting pot” experience like the draft to force diverse groups of Americans to live and work together.

• Language as Politics: In the current climate, Spanish isn’t just a language; it’s often treated as a political statement, making Bad Bunny’s success feel like a “takeover” to those who prefer an English-only status quo.

Final Thoughts

The criticism of Bad Bunny often stems from a feeling of being “left out.” But if the 1950s taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need to know the lyrics to feel the soul of a song.

Perhaps the reason we struggle with foreign-language hits today isn’t a lack of talent on the artist’s part, but a lack of curiosity on ours. We no longer have the grim necessity of global war to force us to see the world; now, we have to choose to look.

⭐ The True Foreign-Language #1 Hits in the U.S.

These were fully or predominantly non-English and went all the way:

  • Volare – Domenico Modugno (Italian) – 1958
  • Sukiyaki – Kyu Sakamoto (Japanese) – 1963
  • Dominique – The Singing Nun (French) – 1963

That’s it — only three in the entire two decades reached #1 in their original languages.

📊 By Language

🇮🇹 Italian

  • Volare – Modugno
  • Al Di Là – Pericoli
  • O Dio Mio – Annette
  • Quando, Quando, Quando – Pat Boone

➡ Italian was the dominant foreign language on U.S. radio in the late ’50s/early ’60s (Sanremo effect + Italian-American audience).

🇪🇸 Spanish

  • La Bamba – Ritchie Valens
  • Guantanamera – The Sandpipers
  • El Watusi – Ray Barretto

➡ Spanish entered via rock & Latin dance crazes.

🇫🇷 French

  • Dominique – The Singing Nun
    ➡ The most unlikely #1 of the rock era.

🇯🇵 Japanese

  • Sukiyaki – Kyu Sakamoto
    ➡ Still the only Japanese-language U.S. Hot 100 #1 in history.
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I Went Back to my Kindergarten Class of 1958– Here is What I Told Them

Show and Tell, 67 Years Later

I arrive in Whitestone, Queens, in the soft, milk-glass light of 1958. The air smells faintly of chalk and floor wax. The sidewalks are narrower, the cars longer, the future quieter. I push open the classroom door and there you all are—knees scabbed, collars starched, haircuts obedient to gravity and mothers. Mrs. LaPenna stands watch, ruler nearby, smile doing most of the work.

You look up at me as if I’m a substitute teacher who took a wrong turn off the Whitestone Expressway. I tell you I’m one of you—just borrowed from a later inning of the same game. I’m here on a time pass from 2025, and I don’t have long.

I start with the easy truths.

“First,” I say, “you’re growing up in a good moment. The Dodgers have left Brooklyn, which hurts, but the Yankees are still a juggernaut. Elvis is on the radio. Ike is in the White House. Polio is on the ropes. Milk comes in bottles and your parents still believe tomorrow will be better because it usually is.”

A few of you grin. One kid in the front row adjusts his bow tie like it’s armor.

“Second,” I say, “hold onto this room. You won’t know it now, but classrooms like this—blackboard dust, wooden desks, a teacher who knows your full name—are where the country learns how to argue without fighting. You’ll need that skill.”

I tell you what’s coming, gently.

“There will be a man on television named Kennedy who makes politics look young. There will be marches where people insist—out loud—that America live up to its own handwriting. There will be a war you’ll see every night at dinner. Some of you will go. Some of you will protest. Most of you will just try to make sense of it all.”

You fidget. Big words for small shoes.

“So here’s the advice,” I say, and I lean in because advice should never be shouted.

“Be curious longer than is comfortable. Read beyond the assignment. Learn how things work—your body, a carburetor, a balance sheet, a sentence. When the world tells you to pick a side fast, slow down. Speed makes noise; understanding makes progress.”

I point to the windows. “Neighborhoods change. Whitestone will still be here, but it will look different. That’s not a loss—it’s a relay. You’ll carry what matters and pass it on.”

I pause, then add the part I didn’t know in kindergarten.

“You will fail at things you’re good at and succeed at things you never planned. That’s not hypocrisy—it’s growth. Be kind to yourself when the map gets smudged.”

Someone asks about the future—always the future.

I smile. “In 2025, you’ll carry a small rectangle in your pocket that knows almost everything. It will be miraculous and distracting. Use it to learn, not to disappear. And when it tells you the world is on fire, remember this room. Remember how a group of five-year-olds once sat still long enough to listen.”

Mrs. LaPenna clears her throat—the bell is coming.

“One more thing,” I say. “Call your parents more than you think you should. Thank teachers while you can. Save a photograph like this and look at it when you’re unsure who you are. You’re in here. So is everyone you’ll ever be.”

The bell rings. Chairs scrape. Time tightens.

As I step back into 2025, the chalk dust follows me for a second, then settles. I carry it with me—the proof that before the headlines and the hindsight, before the decades did what decades do, there was a room in Whitestone where the future sat cross-legged and waited its turn to speak.

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Transportation as a Gateway to Learning—From Subways to Skies

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Early Fascination as a Pathway to Discovery

Some kids memorize baseball stats. Others can name every dinosaur from Allosaurus to Zuniceratops. I was the kid who memorized the New York City subway map.

Four hundred eighty-six track miles, a tangle of lines more intricate than any anatomy chart, and 472 stations—each with its own personality. I used to sit with that map the way other kids sat with comic books. The G’s lonely green line, the A stretching heroically from Inwood to the ocean breeze of the Rockaways, the way the 4 and 5 shadow each other before peeling off like old friends heading to different boroughs. It wasn’t just a system of rails; it was a world of possibility.

Funny thing is, I now have a grandson with the same spark—except his passion lives on the streets and in the skies. At four, he stands on the curb like a miniature car sommelier, announcing make, model, and year before most adults could even identify the color. He studies maps like treasure charts, and when a plane crosses his field of vision, he looks up as if receiving a transmission from some aeronautical muse. He’s never been to San Diego—but when he finally visits, he’ll find it a transportation playground.

How Transportation Curiosity Shapes Learning

There’s something powerful about that kind of early fascination. People think it’s a hobby. But really, it’s a honing mechanism. When a child becomes obsessed with the mechanics of how things move—cars, buses, trains, planes—they’re not just naming machines. They’re building neural circuitry for attention, pattern recognition, systems thinking. They’re learning to follow a thread from point A to point B, and—without realizing it—training themselves for the long game: the ability to learn deeply, persistently, joyfully.

Transportation has always been more than conveyance. It’s a metaphor for growth. Anything that takes you from one place to another reminds you that there are other places, other ideas, other horizons waiting. Whether it’s a subway snaking under Manhattan or a plane banking over Mission Bay, movement awakens possibility.

The journey itself becomes a teacher.

A Few Stops of NYC Subway Trivia

The New York City subway—my first great teacher—remains a marvel. A few favorite bits of trivia:

  • The A train still holds the title for the longest uninterrupted ride in the system—over 32 miles from tip to sea.
  • Times Square is the busiest station, but the deepest is 191st Street in Washington Heights, sitting 180 feet below ground.
  • The 6 train still makes the elegant “City Hall loop,” passing through a hidden 1904 station closed since 1945.
  • And Fulton Center is one of the few places where more than nine different services intersect, creating a kind of transit symphony.

Maps, tracks, transfers—they were my first textbook.

A Balcony Classroom Awaits

Today, my vantage point is different. From a condo on 6th Avenue beside Balboa Park in San Diego, cars glide past in a steady parade. And every few minutes, a plane descends toward the airport, banking low enough to cast a brief shadow across the street. It’s a living exhibit in motion: automotive, aerial, and constant.

Someday, when my grandson finally visits San Diego, he’ll sit on that balcony for the first time. He’ll watch the cars flow by and begin identifying each one with the effortless precision he’s already mastered. He’ll look skyward and recognize the aircraft type, the engines, maybe even its probable origin and destination.

And from that mosaic of motion, he’ll continue his own journey—moving toward new ideas, new abilities, new horizons.

Because transportation, at its core, is a promise:

that where you begin is never where you have to end.

Sometimes all it takes is a subway map, a passing car, or the shadow of a jet to set a lifelong journey in motion.

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🎃 Trick, Treat, and Radiology: Reflections from a 1950s Halloween

From candy corn kernels to X-rayed Milky Ways — one man’s sweet evolution through the decades

Halloween has always been that magical time when ordinary citizens—young and old—put on masks, defy curfew, and demand sugary tribute from strangers. For me, the magic began in the 1950s, when the phrase “trick or treat” meant something pure, thrilling, and slightly unsanitary.

Back then, the concept of getting candy for free by merely showing up at someone’s door was revolutionary. Armed with a paper grocery bag from A&P—free of charge, mind you—I roamed the sidewalks of Queens like a miniature bandit. The rewards were astonishing: a few loose kernels of candy corn, an occasional Lincoln head penny, and from the more affluent homes, a full-sized Hershey bar—the Holy Grail of confectionery.

Packaging was optional, hygiene was theoretical, and nobody used words like “processed sugar intake.” The candy haul was superb thanks to the dense, row-house geography—door to door in seconds. Contrast that to when my own sons went trick-or-treating in the suburbs, where each house sat on half an acre. Their candy-per-step ratio was dismal. I considered handing out Fitbits.

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🍫 The Evolution of a Sweet Tooth

As my palate matured, my candy preferences evolved—from humble candy corn to Reese’s, and then to the sophisticated allure of Milky Way bars during my college days. That was my version of fine dining on a student budget: nougat, caramel, and chocolate—three food groups in one.

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👻 The Tricks of Yesteryear

“Tricks” in mid-20th-century Queens were mostly good-natured. We filled socks with chalk to “decorate” each other’s coats. (Why? Don’t ask. It was a simpler time.) The truly daring among us escalated to egg throwing—back when eggs were so cheap you could use them as projectiles. Imagine that today: “Sorry, officer, I assaulted a Buick with $6 worth of cage-free organics.”

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☠️ When Treats Got Tricky

By the late 20th century, the innocent fun had soured. News reports surfaced of razor blades and metal fragments hidden in candy. Pediatric radiology departments found themselves X-raying trick-or-treat bags. “No cavities,” the doctor would say, “but your Snickers has shrapnel.”

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🦇 Costumes Then and Now

In my childhood, costumes were simple: Batman, Superman, or a random Disney character. The masks were molded plastic that cut off oxygen but never enthusiasm. Today, the front yards are equipped with animatronic zombies, motion-activated ghosts, and sound effects that could raise the dead—or at least startle your Apple Watch into detecting atrial fibrillation.

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🍬 The Spirit Lives On

So, when kids ring my doorbell today, I smile. They’re carrying store-bought pumpkin buckets instead of crumpled A&P bags, and they’re dressed as everything from Spider-Man to Taylor Swift’s cat. But the gleam in their eyes is the same—the age-old thrill of getting something sweet for nothing, of prowling the neighborhood under cover of darkness with permission.

And when they hold out their hands, I drop in a mini-sized candy bar, silently lamenting the extinction of full-size generosity. But hey—at least it’s sterile, gluten-free, and X-ray safe.

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“Back in My Day”: A Field Guide to Modern Sticker Shock


There’s a sound older people make when they see a grocery receipt.

It’s not quite a groan, not quite a gasp — more like the sound you’d make if someone told you a gallon of milk now costs more than your first apartment.

It’s the sound of inflation-induced disbelief — the national anthem of anyone over seventy.

We don’t mean to complain. We simply remember when things were affordable — back before the Dow, the debt, and the avocado entered their current bull markets.

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When Everything Was a Quarter

In the late 1960s, a loaf of bread cost twenty-five cents.

Milk was eighty-nine.

A gallon of gas was thirty-six cents, and the guy pumping it cleaned your windshield without asking for a tip or your Wi-Fi password.

The subway in New York was twenty cents — the same price as a phone call or a cup of coffee, both of which involved more warmth than bandwidth.

Now the subway is $2.90, coffee is $7, and the phone call has been replaced by a “Zoom follow-up.”

Progress, apparently, has a subscription fee.

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The Egg Cream Index

But nothing, nothing, captures the moral collapse of American pricing like the Egg Cream.

In Queens, NY in 1968, an egg cream — that fizzy, chocolatey, seltzer miracle — cost 25 cents.

It was cheap, delicious, and, for reasons no one could explain, contained no egg and no cream.

Last month, I ordered one in West Palm Beach.

It was artisanal, hand-stirred, and served in a mason jar — because apparently all beverages must now resemble something from a farm wedding.

The price: $5.75.

For that, I expected at least a side of nostalgia and maybe a complimentary trip back to Queens.

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Tuition, Steak, and Other Crimes Against Memory

In 1972, you could attend a public university for about $400 a year.

Today, that might cover textbooks — and not even the digital kind.

A rib-eye steak, once $2.49 a pound, now costs $17.

Same cow. Different accountant.

I recently saw a dozen “pasture-raised, stress-free” eggs for $7.99.

At that price, they should hatch a trust fund.

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The Myth of Modern Improvement

We’re told things are better now: cars are safer, thermostats talk, and milk has 47 plant-based alternatives.

Yet somehow, the grocery cart has become a rolling cry for help.

In 1968, I bought a a used Oldsmobile Cutlass for $800.

It started with a key, not a retina scan.

Now it politely reminds me I’m late for a subscription oil change.

We used to own things.

Now we rent the illusion of ownership and call it “smart living.”

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The Economics of Outrage

Wages have risen too, but not nearly enough to prevent the occasional coronary event in the produce aisle.

The cashier asked if I’d like to “round up” for charity.

I told her, “At these prices, I am the charity.”

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Why We Complain (and Why We’re Right)

Younger people think we’re nostalgic.

We’re not.

We’re auditors of reality.

We complain not out of bitterness but because we remember a time when a splurge meant ordering dessert — not securing financing.

Our griping isn’t crankiness. It’s fiscal anthropology.

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Perspective, Adjusted for Inflation

Back in my day, a dollar was a dollar.

It could buy a newspaper, 4 cups of coffee, and the comforting illusion that adulthood came with change back.

Now, a dollar buys… anxiety.

Yes, we live longer, travel faster, and have refrigerators that snitch on us for running out of oat milk.

But deep down, I’d trade it all for one more twenty-cent subway ride, a twenty-five-cent egg cream, and the satisfying thunk of a TV turning off.

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The Moral (Priced to Sell)

So when you hear an older person sigh at the gas pump or glare at the eggs, don’t roll your eyes.

We’re not angry — we’re doing mental arithmetic in 1972 dollars.

And in 1972, math was free, too.

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Labor Day and the Gospel of Work (and Cupcakes)

Labor Day makes me nostalgic. Not for parades, speeches, or backyard grills, but for the curious collection of jobs that introduced me to the American workforce. Each one a rung on the ladder, or maybe a Hostess cupcake on the vending machine coil.

Lawn Mowers and Cash Drawers

It all began in Clearview, mowing lawns in the humid heat for a few bucks and a sore back. Soon after, I graduated to the high-tech world of the high school bookstore, where I operated an NCR cash register. Nothing teaches math faster than a line of impatient teenagers waiting for their pencils and erasers while you wrestle with a drawer that refuses to open.

Big City, Small Jobs

Then came New York City in the late 1960s. I worked for a large textile firm, which is a glamorous way of saying I put checks in order and filed papers. The highlight of my day wasn’t the paycheck, but the two 15-minute breaks. They were sacrosanct — mini-holidays from tedium. Best of all, the vending machine reliably delivered two Hostess cupcakes for a quarter. Talk about compound interest: two for the price of one.

The Printing Press Apprenticeship

In North Queens, I found myself sweeping scraps in a printing factory with Dominican Republican immigrants. They ran the presses; I ran the broom. I like to think I was perfecting an ancient art form — paper scrap feng shui. It was honest work, even if it left me dustier than a chalkboard.

Clerks, Typists, and Crises

As a college graduate, I became a clerk typist at a mental health clinic on Long Island, recording the anxiety and depression of young and middle-aged patients wrestling with the life crises of the mid-1970s. It was a front-row seat to the human condition, typewritten one page at a time.

I later fulfilled my dream to attend an Ivy League school — not as a student, but as a clerk typist for a renowned Organic Chemistry professor at Columbia. The pre-med students tried to peer over my shoulder to steal exam questions, as if my typewriter were some kind of oracle.

At the American Health Foundation, I typed case-control study questions about cancer prevalence. Occasionally, I was even promoted to ghostwriter for love letters from esteemed scientists — proof that the line between research and romance is thinner than a sheet of carbon paper.

A Salute to Work

Each of those jobs was a tiny cog in the great machine of American productivity. From mowing lawns to sweeping floors to transcribing science (and scandal), I contributed my modest share to the GDP. And on Labor Day, I cherish not just the opportunities this country gave me, but also the workers beside me: the immigrants, the clerks, the professors, and yes — even the vending machine that believed in generosity.

Because in the end, Labor Day isn’t just about honoring work. It’s about recognizing that every job — no matter how small, boring, or sugar-coated — is a building block in the story of our country.