David Klein's Blog, page 5

Use It or Lose It

I know first-hand about “use it or lose it” syndrome. After I stopped doing pull-ups due to a shoulder injury, when I was finally ready to try again, I could barely get myself above the bar. I used to be able to make myself understood speaking French, but having left Switzerland decades ago I’m now […]

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The Movie Club Rules

The first rule of the Dad’s Movie Club is that we have to follow all of the rules. We have many of them. Rule #5: Movie night shall occur on the second Wednesday of every month, unless a special exception is granted in a given month and all three officers unanimously agree to the exception, […]

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These Two Mothers

Today I honor the two most influential mothers in my life: my mother, Irene Klein, and my life partner and mother to Julia and Owen, Harriet Jaffe. Irene It’s been more than forty years since I’ve had a mother. I have only the same few memories of my mother; many are foggy. I can form […]

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Why So Unhappy?

In the 2025 World Happiness Report, the United States dropped to its lowest ranking since that survey began. The U.S. ranked 24th out of 147 countries, a decline from its 15th-place ranking in 2023 and its highest ranking of 11th place in 2012. The low score can be attributed by the unhappiness of people under the […]

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M’aidez on May Day

It gives me a boost to know that across the country people were engaged in mass protests today against the Trump authoritarian regime. May 1—known as May Day—is the perfect opportunity to take to the streets. May Day has a long association with pagan and spring festivals in Europe dating back to the Roman Empire, […]

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On Sale Through Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is just around the corner and I’m sure you know a mom who loves to read. What better for a mom than a page-turning family saga? Now through Mother’s Day, my novels In Flight and The Suitor are available on sale for only $12! That’s right, hours of reading pleasure for your favorite […]

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Doing vs. Being

I’m rethinking an adage I’ve often believed in: you are what you do. The novelist Annie Dillard best encapsulated this concept when she wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Dillard reinforces the concept […]

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Sinners

In my continuing effort to support our only local theater, the Spectrum, that screens independent, classic, and cult-status films along with first-run mainstream movies, we went to see Sinners the other night. What a crazy, highly entertaining fusion of Horror, Western, Musical, Period Piece, Black genre, and Thriller. It sounds like it can’t work. It […]

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Detached, But Such Is Life

It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days. Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of […]

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Villanelle #2: Swan Song

As I wrote in my previous post, Villanelle #1, a villanelle poem adheres to a strict form. It comprises nineteen lines—five tercets of three lines each, and one four-line quatrain at the end. There is a fixed rhyming pattern, and the first and third lines of the opening tercet are called the refrain and are repeated alternately in […]

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