Category Archives: Journalist

Michael Connelly

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“One thing that never gets old
Is holding a finished book
For the first time”
Michael Connelly

There’s one thing I truly enjoy and that is attending lectures and hearing famous writers talk about their books and their craft of writing. Through the years I’ve been fortunate to see some of my favorite writers. But, there’s one man I never thought I’d get to see in person and that is, Michael Connelly.

A fan of Connelly’s work for decades, I’m proud to say I’ve read everything he’s ever published. I wait for each new book to drop so I can devour each page.

Michael Connelly began his career immediately after graduating from the University of Florida in 1980. His first job was as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News Journal. Then in 1986 he began writing for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel where he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash. This newspaper story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The honor also brought Connelly a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

If you are not familiar with Connelly’s work, he also has a few successful television series. From the Harry Bosch series to the Lincoln Lawyer all just as entertaining as his novels.

As an Angeleno, I enjoy how he weaves into each novel locations in Los Angeles, Catalina Island and the Southern California areas very familiar to most people living in California.

Connelly’s new book, The Hollow was just released and at the lecture he handed out free signed copies. I have a stack of autographed books from authors I’ve admired the last fifty years. This signed copy is definitely one I will treasure for many years because it was signed by crime fiction writer, Michael Connelly.

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Free Speech

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“I can feel in myself, and see
In others around me, a powerful
Nostalgia for the time
When history existed.”
Francis Fukuyama

Bust of President Zachary Taylor covered in plastic after blood was smeared on it when a Trump mob broke into the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021

We’ve created a world where everybody can talk, but only a select few people are actually heard. Anybody can start a newsletter or get on social media, but only a few people are ever actually seen and heard.

Francis Fukuyama writes about in his new book, In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir, that while free speech is certainly important, the issue facing us today is about amplification.

More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is a personal history as well as a political history. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work, recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and he illuminates the crises of the twenty-first century. In the Realm is the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years.

In our current fragile democracy, who gets to be heard? How is the President of the United States allowed to use taxpayer dollars for his political propaganda? How is the President of the United States allowed to stymie freedom of speech?

Another important terrifying tell is, why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Because it bought him a megaphone. Musk was already the richest man in the world, and yet he had to sit by the phone and wait for the BBC or CNN to call him. Billions of dollars couldn’t get him an audience, but his own social media could. And so, he bought social media.

As long as humans have been alive, some people have been heard more than others. At first, this meant the loudest or the most charismatic voices were heard. But then came the gatekeepers. First, publishers decided who could write a book or get in a newspaper. Then came radio, then TV, and now the internet.

Today, Meta and Google control the vast amount of what anybody hears or sees. Everybody can speak. But who gets heard is decided by a few companies changing algorithms and rules.

And so, we hear from the influencers and celebrities who know how to make a viral reel. We hear only about those topics that get shared or liked, or don’t violate a company’s terms of service.

Here and now, our conversations get narrowed, and the speakers are muted or amplified, depending on what a few gatekeepers actually want us to see and hear, while calling it free speech.

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A Champion For Women

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“”The truth will set you free
But first it will piss you off.” 
Gloria Steinem

Last Wednesday, September 2, 2026 the World lost another passionate talented and intelligent woman. Gloria Steinem, the American journalist and political activist who became the face for feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died at age 92.

Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Gloria Marie Steinem inherited an activist tradition. Her grandmother served as chair of the educational committee of the National Women Suffrage Association and also helped rescue members of her family, who were Jewish, from Germany during the mid-1930s.

Steinem graduated from Smith College and moved to New York in 1960, where she was often sexualized and dismissed while searching for reporting jobs in a male-dominated journalism industry. “We need a reporter, not a pretty girl,” she says she was told by an editor at Life Magazine.

By 1962, one of her first articles was published in Esquire Magazine, an exploration of birth control and shifting sexual beliefs among college students. Themes that would continue to appear in her later work.

Gloria’s near century on earth were years well lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end. Steinem was a feminist icon who spent the better part of a century advocating for women’s rights in the workplace, especially equal pay for women as well as the right to abortion and sex education.

Her name and face became synonymous with the fight for women’s rights. She continued to be a vocal proponent of feminism and other liberal causes; like anti-war activism well into her 90s. She devoted her life to the pursuit of equality and political change. She worked tirelessly for over 70 years to ensure each generation built upon the work of the previous one.

I will be forever grateful for her many accomplishments helping woman. She fought so I could choose whatever I wanted to do with my life rather than be confined by traditional gender roles. Something she said that I have lived by is:
“Do what you love so much that you forget what time it is when you’re doing it.”

She changed women’s lives by opening up possibilities we never imagined. “Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.” As she also stated: “Women are not a special interest group; they are half the population.”

She lit a torch many years ago. It is now our responsibility to keep that torch lifted and lit into the future.

Rest in peace Gloria. You will be missed as a champion for woman.

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