In less than five weeks, Americans will know if they've shaken off the shackles of stupidity that have plagued our country for almost two years. No midterm election in my 72-1/2 years has carried the weight of this one. All that's at stake is the fate of democracy in the United States, the stability of the world order and the lives of millions of people here and around the world.

This week's convening of the United Nations General Assembly spotlights the warped state of our world in 2026. You used to know the good guys and bad guys. You used to think that we, here in the United States of America, fell into the good guys category. Now, it's hard to say. American presidents served as the guide in the fights against fascism, Soviet communism and terrorism.

If you fly 5,000 miles over nearly a full day with two lousy changeovers in Los Angeles, you must like a place a lot to do it again. That's Kauai. My wife and I went there in March for our second visit. The first trip, in 2022, ended with us desperately trying to find a way not to go home. …

Osama bin Laden's capture in May 2010, 8-1/2 years after he perpetrated the atrocities of 9/11,, united the United States. If you remember, there were spontaneous celebrations in Washington and other cities. After President Obama announced the special forces team's success, he went to New York for a solemn wreath laying at the World Trade Center site. Then he visited city firefighters at a station particularly hard hit, sharing lunch with the crew.

I named my second album before I completed all the songs on it. I'm not sure that's what other musical artists do, but I don't know that I'm particularly typical. As I developed songs, I noticed a bunch of them shared a theme. "Destination Unknown." "The Secret." "X Is Rarely the First Letter of a Song's Title." Mystery. There's an irony to that.

Here's how you can tell the summer went by fast: When it began, the Mets still had a chance to make the playoffs and the Great Lake north of Rochester was Lake Ontario. A lot of folks probably thought the Mets were done around Memorial Day. But nobody, not even the cetriolo behind the move, imagined renaming a lake that's had the same name for almost 400 years.

My second album, "Man of Mystery," drops today. Here is the song page from the HearNow site: That's right. My second album. I released the first, "Walkin' Downtown," two years ago. Wait a second. Some of you who know me, either through my career as a journalist or as a blogger are having a hard time wrapping your mind around the word "album."

There are three kinds of baseball fans. I belong to the group that loves the game. The tension of the pitch count and the different situations. Where to position players. Hitting strategy. Pitching strategy. Running. Fielding. The whole gamut. The other two kinds are people who are baseball fans because it's a social activity, or are loyal to a team in their city or birthplace.

The other night I rewatched "American Graffiti." It's the 1973 movie that launched a lot of careers - George Lucas directed, Richard Dreyfuss was one of the leads, Harrison Ford had a supporting role. The premise, for those of you who forgot or didn't see it, is the final night in a northern California town for four teenage guys. Two of the four are headed off to college "in the East" the next morning.

My son traveled to Chicago this past week. Of course, he flew. He was scheduled to leave LaGuardia at 2:30 p.m. ET and get to O'Hare at 3:30 p.m. If all went well, he would reach his accommodations just south of the Loop by 5 p.m., 6 at the latest. Yeah, right. The travel gods aligned perfectly against him. There was bad weather in both New York and Chicago - and probably somewhere in the 800 miles along the way.

Let’s face it: If you never hear the words “Strait of Hormuz” again in your life, it will be too soon.

If you were anywhere between the Bronx and Saratoga Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, you're still drying out. Parts of a band that runs along Interstate 87 in New York got as much as 9-1/2 inches of rain in the overnight period. Massive flooding. Buildings washed away. Get used to it. Climate change is no longer in the warning stage. It's here, and the deluge New Yorkers felt and heard is just one more indication that we might passed the point that this is fixable.

They waited until the next morning. But both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 conceded defeat when they ran for President against Donald Trump. This is brought up because in between those two elections, Trump himself graciously conceded the 2020 election to Joe Biden. He called the President-elect and wished him, Vice President-elect Harris and the incoming administration well, offering whatever cooperation he could.

The New York Mets resume their 2026 slosh of a season. Oh, joy!

Until last night, Graham Platner was the Democratic candidate for the Maine U.S. Senate seat now held by Susan Collins. He won the party primary with a populist campaign that resonated with Down Easters (am I allowed to write that if I'm a New Yorker who's visited Maine twice?). Among his stances are supporting a woman's right to an abortion, getting big money out of politics and bolstering the state's struggling business - including fishing, which is what he does.

My first visit to London in 1983 came the year after "E.T., the Extra Terrestrial" captured the world's imagination. One day, the movie came up in a discussion with a friend and I asked what impressed Europeans the most about it. He did not say the cute alien or even the depiction of American suburban life. He said it was Elliott, the free-spirited preteen who finds and befriends E.T.

I'm surprised Trump and his cult want all of the nation to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence. The key word in the above sentence is celebrate. It's hard to think of people more miserable than Donald Trump, the kakistocracy that comprises the U.S. government and his mean-spirited MAGA supporters. If you told me they all suffer from chronic constipation, I would believe it.

Of course Donald Trump gave Iran $400 billion to end the war he started. It's not his money. It's ours. Trump has been great at spending our money on stuff we don't want. Tariffs with countries we don't have any beef with. Ballrooms and UFC fights at the White House. Rounds of golf in Palm Beach and Bedminster. And, of course, the war we won 40 times but are somehow paying reparations to end.

What 80th birthday gift do you get the man who wants everything? Donald Trump somehow believes he's entitled to anything he sets his mind to. Some soccer club's tournament trophy. A young woman's Olympic gold medal in a sport he probably doesn't know exists. Republican nominees for office who think the way he wants and not for themselves. It's an amazing state of being and it boils down to a simple fact: the man is incapable of guilt.

St. Petersburg, Russia, is 655 miles - as the drone flies - from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. It's closer to Helsinki, Finland. And yet, the home region of Vladimir Putin found itself under attack this week from drones launched by the Ukrainians. If I had written that sentence four years ago, when Russia launched its war against Ukraine, expects would have said I was nuts.

Four days after his 71st birthday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins was scheduled to play a concert in Boston. The date was September 11, 2001, and before he could leave his apartment in lower Manhattan, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. The concert was postponed, but five days later he played to a crowd trying - like the rest of us - to recover from the trauma.

IF you read this after 12:35 a.m. ET on Friday, May 22, "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" is now just television history. In fact, the Columbia Broadcasting System's effort to come up with an entry for late-night TV is over. It began in the late 1960s, when the network realized that the old movies airing on its owned stations as "The Late Show" couldn't match the juggernaut that was NBC "The Tonight Show."

It's now been four years since the six Republican toadies on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended safe legal abortion in a large swath of the United States. It's now been only a couple of weeks since those same six dolts eviscerated 60 years of progress in giving representation to Black people over pretty much the same territory.

If Trumpers weren't so homophobic. they would adopt Peter Allen's "Everything Old Is New Again" as their theme song. Because it seems their goal is to bring back a lot of crap from the past, under the pretense of making America great "again." There are some pretty serious bad things Trump's trying to make a comeback. Criminalizing abortion. Wiping out Black representation.

Attempts to murder the President of the United States date back to 1835, when an unemployed painter named Richard Lawrence tried to kill Andrew Jackson outside the Capitol. Lawrence didn't kill Jackson - his gun misfired and he was wrestled to the ground. Most presidential assassination attempts aren't well-plotted efforts to effect regime change. The only really conspiratorial one was the slaying of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 - John Wilkes Booth and his gang sought to undo the South's surrender in the Civil War by killing the president and other key members of his administration.

Virginians did what they needed to do Tuesday. The idea of redistricting a state in the middle of a 10-year Census period is odious. Naturally, it originated with Donald Trump.  He demanded Texas find more Republican seats in the House, and yapping Republicans said "Yes, master!" The legislature voted to alter the district boundaries in a way that supposedly would put five seats held by Democrats in the Republican camp.

Currently representing New York's 17th Congressional District, where I live, is Republican Smarmy Mike Lawler. If you've spent any time on social media in this first third of 2026, you might be familiar with Smarmy Mike. His town hall meetings feature him lecturing constituents angry about the Iran war and the tariffs. He usually has somebody who really irks him thrown out - a veteran or an elderly woman.

Donald Trump loved Tuesday this week. He lives for days like this past Tuesday. The rest of us don't. Some 342 million other Americans and 8 billion other denizens of this planet wondered if he'd carry through on his threat that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Trump knew he'd back away from obliterating Iran.

The legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, one of my career inspirations, used to occasionally put together a column of his random pronouncements on life. The column was entitled "Nobody Asked Me, But..." and was cherished by his readers at The New York Post, the New York Journal-American and the King Features Syndicate nationwide. Now, what's embarrassing about what I'm about to do is that Wikipedia, of all things, is pre-calling me out on this.

POIPU, HAWAII - By the time you read this, I will have left Kauai, where I've spent the past two weeks. It's been mostly terrific. Because I love Hawaii. Especially this island, Kauai. We've been very lucky - almost lottery-quality lucky. The three other main islands - Oahu, Maui and Hawaii - were inundated by rain in what's called Kona Storms.

Yes, we're just a few days past the 2025 Academy Awards, but let's reveal the plot for the Best Picture winner of 2036. The title could be something like "Lost Valor" or "Following Orders." It takes place in the dark times of the mid to late 2020s and is about a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army. We'll call him Chad.

The town supervisor where I live suffered a tizzy recently. His name is George Hoehmann and he, of course, is a Republican. He won election in 2015 supporting, among other things, a limit of two terms in office. He is currently serving his sixth two-year term. Hypocritical or not, the small percentage of Clarkstown, New York's population that votes in local elections believe he's doing a good job.

In 1978, my father and I engaged in an animated debate on a car ride home. Amazingly, it was about Iran. What was amazing was who was on what side. At the time, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Shah of Iran. He had been a strong ally of the United States for more than 25 years - ever since the U.S. and Britain engineered the coup that toppled an elected prime minister in 1953.

Did you watch this week's State of the Union address? I sure as hell didn't. I phoned a friend, played a computer baseball game (OOTP - I highly recommend it!) and cleaned some of the mess on my desk. Three years ago, we were in Palm Springs when President Biden delivered the speech. His detractors - and even some supporters - wondered if he'd become too addled to stay focused.

Did you watch this week's State of the Union address? I sure as hell didn't. I phoned a friend, played a computer baseball game (OOTP - I highly recommend it!) and cleaned some of the mess on my desk. Three years ago, we were in Palm Springs when President Biden delivered the speech. His detractors - and even some supporters - wondered if he'd become too addled to stay focused.

Gung Hai Fat Choy! The lunar new year began Tuesday. It's the Year of the Horse in the Chinese zodiac, which means that for people born in 1954 - including me - and every 12 years after, it's our year. Unfortunately for us, and fortuitously for the People's Republic of China, it's also another year of Donald Trump. Trump was actually born in the Year of the Dog, 1946.

Congratulations to any of you who root for the Seattle Seahawks. Being a former sportswriter, I know that a winning Super Bowl team is the one that executes its game plan better. On Sunday, the Seahawks' plan appeared to be focusing on the younger members of the New England Patriots' offensive line and pressuring their quarterback. The Patriots came close to figuring it out in the fourth quarter, but came up short.

Carter Woodson created what has become Black History Month because he refused to be erased. Woodson became a black historian the hard way. His parents, both slaves until a few years before he was born, needed his income in rural Virginia. So he worked as a sharecropper and miner, moving to West Virginia at 17 to dig for coal there.

When my wife and I visited Minneapolis in 2024, we loved it. Of course, having close friends there doesn't hurt. Or the fact that, as in every other trip I've taken to the state of Minnesota, the temperature never fell below 70°. That includes two trips in late September and early October, when New York was in the 40s. I have no idea what it's like when the high is minus 10°.

If you're not aware of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech Tuesday at the World Economic Forum, learn about it fast. It's the future Trump bequeaths us. A world in which we, the people of the United States, no longer matter the way we have my entire 71-3/4 years. What Carney said, basically, is what we've been trying to point out since this country put Trump back in the White House a year ago.

What to write about? Just last week alone, Trump seemed to average more than one crisis a day. Iran. Venezuela. Greenland (imagine going back in time and trying to explain a crisis with Greenland), Minnesota, blue states in general, Ford workers, the Fed chairman, the environment, climate change treaties. I'm sure there's more. It's part of his overall modus operandi: create distractions and poke the wound to keep your enemies - and it's weird to think a President of the United States sees half the populace as his enemy instead of his boss - off guard.

I first became aware of Venezuela when I was about 6. I received a board game for Christmas that involved moving cargo from one international port to another. It was a great way to learn about international ports, one of which was Maracaibo, from which the country exports its oil. Then, of course, when I was a little older, I got Risk.

It doesn't seem as if this can go on. For the better part of the last year - since noon ET on January 20 - the United States has been building toward a rolling boil. The temperature ratcheted up almost every day by some new outrage emanating from a desecrated White House. Until we got to this point. A new year that starts with a divided - maybe hopelessly - country.

For me, one song seems to stand out in a given holiday season. It's a song I hear early in the season, just before Thanksgiving, and then it reverbs through my head leading up to today. This year, it's this song. The reason has only a little to do with the music. I think it's because this is a very bleak mid-winter.

The bad news for James Lord Pierpont is that he wrote his only popular song, "The One-Horse Open Sleigh," in the 1850s. No ASCAP or BMI, no on-air or streaming royalties, no Bandcamp to sell music online. The good news is that Pierpont was a jerk, so it's not as if a nice guy got stiffed. Many of his songs were written for minstrel shows in both the North and South, deriving laughs from stereotypes of Black people.

One of the more joyous holiday songs has a contentious authorship history. The song is credited to two marketing guys, Joseph Carleton Beal and James Ross Boothe, But the most famous performer of the song, Bobby Helms, said he and studio musician Hank Garland turned the lousy tune they were given into a holiday classic - and that the final recording bears no resemblance to the original.

Andy Williams hosted a variety show in the 1960s - he helped inflict the Osmond Brothers on the world with it. For one of his annual Christmas shows, Williams turned to his music director, George Wyle, for an original song. He and partner Eddie Pola came up with this one. Wyle wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs. But the one you might remember is the theme to "Gilligan's Island," the most prominent lyric being about a "three-hour tour."

This is an optimistic postwar song made popular by oldtime crooners, Perry Como and Bing Crosby. It was written by Meredith Willson, who is much better known for "The Music Man." The song has a great opening line - so memorable that it gets quoted or paraphrased a lot. If you had a dollar for every TV anchor who will start a story with "It's beginning to look a lot like...," you'd be able to afford this holiday season.

Harry Connick Jr, came to prominence when his versions of American standards were featured prominently in Rob Reiner's "When Harry Met Sally." But this song, from his first holiday album, is one that the singer/bandleader wrote himself. It has a great big band vibe, with the band singing along at certain points. And it tells a really cute Christmas Eve story very vividly. The song has been covered since its debut in 1993. But it's Connick's version that's the definitive one.

The birthplace of this song is Wayland, Massachusetts, about 20 miles west of Boston. It was there that a Unitarian minister, Edmund Sears, wrote the poem from which the song gets its lyrics. In 1849, he joined with a buddy, Richard Storrs Willis, who contrinuted his melody called "Carol." Or at least that's how it goes here in the United States.