About Me

Welcome to Annie Asks You: Seeking Dialogue to Inform, Enlighten, and/or Amuse You and Me.

My interests are diverse: just about every aspect of what is sometimes called “current events,” with a frequent political emphasis (interrupted by breaks when I find matters have become unbearable); health and wellness; the environment; animal behavior and the human/animal bond; and other topics I come across that pique my curiosity and I hope will interest you as well. I’m primarily a prose writer, though I dabble in poetry on occasion–and I love bad puns.

I began writing decades ago, when The New York Times introduced a New Jersey Weekly section. Delighted by this publication giant’s neighborly interest, I sent off three letters to the editor in quick succession. To my amazement, The Times ran all three as Op-Eds and sent me payment for each.  The result: I started my career with the hugely erroneous assumption that life as a freelance writer was easy and potentially profitable.

Years of hard work, revisions, and rejections followed, but so did many essays and articles published in various newspapers and magazines, as well as two longer, coauthored documents: a book written with a plastic surgeon and a monograph published by the American Library Association.

There were also some interesting long-term projects: editing the Bulletin of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (Columbia University); serving as Project Editor for a federally funded study of the ethical, legal, and social implications of the Human Genome Project; and acting as vice president of a nonprofit foundation that was an early effort to provide the public with access to public information via the Internet. I then served as a writer/editor for a magazine for physicians and as managing editor and subsequently vice president for a continuing medical education company.

When I began this blog in 2018, I was seeking efforts to find common ground among people to lower the temperature of our national angst and strive for a more peaceful country and world.

For now, I am an admittedly imperfect messenger in that regard, as I have explained on occasion. I still hold that as an ideal, and I hope to return to it when our leaders no longer practice the divisiveness that is making us forget how much we do, in fact, have in common. In the meantime, I continue to welcome hearing from those who disagree with me.

I’ll sometimes express strong opinions, and I hope you’ll do the same with your comments. But I also hope our shared goal will be not necessarily to agree–but to politely and respectfully give serious consideration to one another’s views. I continue “Seeking Dialogue to Inform, Enlighten, and/or Amuse You and Me.”

Annie