Last weekend marked my first experience at a US National Park in decades. I have been to dozens of national parks in countries on five continents during this period so it was a re-acculturation to visit one on my home turf. Shenandoah National Park was established in 1935, but its…

A neighborhood Facebook group had an upsetting new entry about our apartment complex. Someone living here was stalking unaccompanied residents with a camera dangling from his arm, taking a barrage of pictures uninvited, following them from their car to their door, persisting in unwelcome conversation. The description of this stalker…

For many would-be vegetarians, the cheese conundrum is the big stumbling block. Cheese can be a protein-rich substitute for meat, but quality cheeses contain animal-based rennet (sliced from the stomachs of newborn calves and unweaned piglets, to boot!) so they are not acceptable to serious vegetarians. Most mass-market cheeses in…

When I met the Rhino Lady, she was already retired and living beside an 88,000-acre game reserve near the very northern tip of South Africa, rather than on the 61,000-acre rhinoceros sanctuary she had created in Kenya decades earlier. Still, Anna Merz’s final home had its own resident rhinos, and…

Who was “The Nanny?” I had no idea. One result of living outside one’s native country is that some cultural references are lost, notably TV shows that don’t travel abroad. One of the latter was an American TV comedy of the 1990s, reasonably successful in its time but completely unknown…

We were standing at the entrance to the Parco del Ticino (the park that follows the Ticino River north of Milan) some years ago, reading a sign that said — among a whole list of prohibitions — “No dogs allowed.” And there we were, my husband, myself, and our large…

Trying to compare the quality of life between Italy and the US is like comparing pasta and hamburgers. Both have their virtues but they are not on equivalent nutritional levels, much less culinary ones. (Vegetarians who shun beef would be just as hard-pressed to compare the Impossible Burger, say, to…

No question that technology has been integrated more fully into life in the States as compared to Italy, where I lived for many decades. If you are trying to contact a US-based business, doctor, lawyer, or repairman, you will most likely jump through the hoops of a multi-part menu before…

Hollywood is planning a remake of “White Men Can’t Jump,” the 1992 film about streetballers whose hustle was based on stereotypes. One stereotype was that dorky looking guys who seem out of place can’t play basketball, and another was that Black guys always play better than whites. The two protagonists…