“Feeling For Life” is the title I gave my most recent radio special–a two-hour exploration of Indonesian music and musicology. My special guest, Cornell Emeritus Professor of Music and Asian Studies Marty Hatch, founded the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble in 1972. He gave a vivid picture of the role of Javanese music, as understood by Western …
[TL;DR – See my radio portfolio on this website!] My motivation for launching this website was to help with marketing and attracting clients for my freelance writing and editing work. From that narrow perspective, I would have to say the site has not delivered success to this point. Such a view, however, suffers from a …
My weekly radio broadcast, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” is an endless source of pleasure for me (and my handful of fans!). This past week I did one of my best-ever specials–a timely piece from nine decades ago, if you know what I mean, about the banking crisis of early 1933. The Great Depression truly “hit …
One of my most enjoyable pursuits over the past couple of years has been participating in a new humanist organization and working on the podcast we call When Humanists Attack!! These projects have reached some benchmarks that are worth reporting in this space. My old pals Vincent Downing and Chris West recruited me for the …
Back in the bygone days of 2018-2019 I had the chance to smith some words, in the “social studies” genre, for one of the ultimate prestige vendors: the National Geographic Society. Their editorial standards were the most exacting under which I’ve ever worked, but it was quite clear the final product would in all cases …
On the video podcast I co-host, When Humanists Attack!!, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing one of the greatest performance artists working today, Bill Talen, AKA Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Billy’s message has been resounding in my head ever since—it was echoing when I learned about the latest pronouncement from …
Jan. 20, 2021 – Stirred by today’s inauguration of the second Catholic POTUS and first female VPOTUS, I suddenly remembered this unpublished op-ed I wrote in the middle of 2018. I thought I’d take the opportunity to place it on the record today, just as a testament to what we may, if we’re lucky, be …
What insights can we gain by looking at philosophy from a comic point of view, or at comedy from a philosophical point of view? Few are better equipped to tackle such portentous questions than my lifelong friend Eric Kaplan, Ph.D., the Emmy-winning TV comedy writer, executive producer on The Big Bang Theory, and author of …
According to an article on Forbes.com, the Hollywood family comedy The War With Grandpa—adapted from the 1980s children’s book by my father, Robert Kimmel Smith, and starring Robert De Niro—earned just over a million bucks box office on its first day of release, October 9, making it the number-one movie in the Coming-Apart-at-the-Seams States of …
To commemorate the 75th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as the Russian invasion of Manchuria that started in between), I produced a special documentary episode of my weekly radio program, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” that aired from noon to 2pm on August 7, 2020. Blending popular recordings from 1945 …