I don’t seem to count for much

Sam Smith I have just received my census form and I don't seem to count for much. I guess I was living in the past, thinking of that time when the friendly woman sat in our living room and asked about our plumbing, the age of our house and so forth. It was fun reducing …

Loran lullaby

Sam Smith The difference between losing your grandmother and losing a technology is that it's much harder to replace your grandmother than it is a technology that, after all, almost inevitably vanishes because something better has come along. Hence perhaps the silence about the disappearance of Loran as of last month - a navigational system …

Leaving DC

Sam Smith 2009  Sometime this year the Review will be moving fulltime to its New England regional headquarters in Freeport, Maine, previously home only for the estivatory editions of summer. I have deep ties to Maine, going back more than six decades. I have long lived as a geographical split personality, with the phrase bi-coastal …

The end of an affair

Sam Smith 2009 I was raised on Chryslers. I can only remember one General Motors machine ever being granted resident parking permission in my parent's driveway and the only Ford I ever drove was a farm tractor. Admittedly, my first car was a 1941 Oldsmobile Hydromatic. But it was 20 years old, had just 26,000 …

SHOP TALK

Sam Smith I almost missed it. I just realized Review started 45 years ago this month as The Idler, at a time when there were less than a dozen alternative progressive publications around - like the Village Voice, Realist, IF Stone's Weekly and Carolina Israelite. Today, according to the latest Alexa and Netcraft stats, the …

RAMPANT SELF PROMOTION

Mike Palecek interviewed your editor for his site, the New American Dream. Click here and then scroll down to New American Dream Interview to find it. Here's an except: NAD: Why have you done all this? SAM SMITH: So what else was I meant to do? NAD: Why are you so interested? SAM SMITH: My …

Ann

Sam Smith When 9/11 happened, one of the first people I thought of was Ann Jones. I was working out in my basement six blocks from the US Capitol, my wife was at her office five blocks from the White House and one of the captured planes was still on its way to Washington. Ann …

FIDEL & ME

IF there has been one constant in my journalistic life it has been Fidel Castro. Even Teddy Kennedy had just been admitted to the Massachusetts Bar when I covered Castro for the first and only time. And though I would never actually see him again, Fidel would ceaselessly reappear like some ghost of revolutions past, …

Fifty years of journalism

Sam Smith 2007 I actually started in journalism more than fifty years ago. At the age of 13 I began a family newspaper - first handwritten, then typed, that lasted some 20 issues and dealt with everything with my mother's predilection for yogurt and wheat germ to UFOs, the H-bomb and the shocking fact that …

Hoarding my mazuzah

SAM SMITH - According to the Washington Jewish Week, "That signature piece of Judaica is a fixture (literally and figuratively) on doorposts almost anywhere there are Jews. But in some isolated communities where the Jewish population is shrinking and scribes are becoming an endangered species, the supply of mezuzot is dwindling as well, and that's …

Harder to read than Ulysses

SAM SMITH - All along your editor has thought his problem was that he didn't speak opaquely and complexly enough to make it with the Washington crowd. Now the Amazon text rating system has proved otherwise. As reader CH put it, "I'm laughing my ass off. I first found out about this feature at Jorn …

Practicing anthropology without a license

Sam Smith {From a speech delivered to the 100th anniversary conference of the Berkeley School of Anthropology] Ever since I got the invitation to speak to you all I have been bragging because to an anthropology BA this is a bit like an ex-con being asked to address a conference of the American Bar Association. …

Keeping the faith

Sam Smith 2007 [I am occasionally asked why I sign my letters, "Keep the faith," and of which faith am I speaking. When an ex - Mormon - turned - Episcopalian journalist raised the issue, I sent the following reply] Far be it for me to distinguish amongst such ancient and venerable theologies, but the …

Jury duty

SAM SMITH, 2002 - Your editor had been called to jury duty. On three or four occasions in the past, I have been dismissed owing to my belief in the constitutionality of a jury's right to judge both the facts and the law and in the  unconstitutionality of the drug war. The last time, the …

Banned

SAM SMITH, MULTITUDES - By the 1990s, facts had became obsolete in Washington. They were at best a filler between arguments on TV about what really mattered -- perception and image. Facts were background noise at a news conference, multi-colored jimmies on scoops of policy and just plain annoying in private conversation. At times I …