A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Article: “Dear Client, thieves may be eyeing your home. No worries.” By Ron Lieber for New York Times on August 31, 2026. This longtime Times business columnist returned from vacation to find a letter from the bank that held his mortgage “confirming changes to your address.” Only, he hadn’t made any changes. He hurriedly called the bank and the person he reached (at a distant call center) said the records showed no address change so it he shouldn’t worry about it. He pressed the call center person who said there was an added layer of security he could activate but would have to do it in person at a branch. So he went to a local branch – this is a big national bank – spent 45 minutes with an assistant manager who didn’t know what he was talking about. In other words, the “added layer of security” wasn’t a thing. Afterwards, acting in his professional capacity as a NYT columnist about to do an article on the bank, he got someone who knew what they were doing to call him back. It seems the columnist lives in a condo (called “an apartment” by New Yorkers) and that the unit number messed up the bank’s automated address check system which considered it a new address. However, the bank official and others the reporter spoke to for this article says that changing the mailing address of a property owner on file with a bank is one tactic thieves use to conduct title theft, but that those most at risk are the elderly or recently deceased, so if you know anyone in those categories, you should pay especially close attention to their property and to the local property records to intercept any fraudulent activity early in the process.

Article: “Collecting Old Filmstrips Before They Disappear” by Christian Kriticos, New York Times, September 5, 2026. Filmstrips were a mainstay of my K through 8 education which ended in 1972. Because I’m interested in the history of technology and also in people who try to save information and the tangible media it resides on, I was very interested in this story. Hardly any archives collect filmstrips so some volunteers working independently are doing their best.

Obituary: Gloria Steinem (1934-2026) by Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, September 4, 2026. It’s funny but I don’t recall reading anything by Gloria Steinem or seeing her interviewed, yet I had tremendous respect for her. Perhaps that’s because I’ve recognized that the US has long treated women as second class citizens. It was much worse long ago but that disparate treatment continues today and in some ways is worsening since young women growing up in America today in some ways have fewer rights than their grandmothers had at the same age. I knew that Steinem fought for the cause of women for her entire long life and respect her for that which is why I made note of her passing. 

Book Review: “Two lives, one Russia” by Nicholas Danilov (1988). The name “Nicholas Danilov” came up a few weeks ago and I immediately recalled that in the 1980s while working as an American journalist in Moscow he was arrested for espionage and held for several weeks until he was exchanged for a Soviet spy who’d been arrested by the Americans. I wanted to refresh my memory so ordered his memoir via interlibrary loan. One reason Danilov wanted to work in Russia was because of his deep family routes there. His grandfather had been a senior general in the Russian Army before World War I, survived the war and the Soviet takeover and got himself and his family out of Russia. But the grandfather of the general’s wife had also been a Russian army officer named Fyodor Frolov. However, when Frolov was just a lieutenant in 1825, he got caught up in an attempt by a cohort of army officers to assassinate the Czar and initiate a democratic revolution in Russia. The coup was discovered, the leaders executed, and the followers exiled to Siberia. After ten years of incarceration, Frolov married and had a family. While working in Moscow, Danilov spent many hours searching for Frolov’s story. When Danilov was arrested and imprisoned, he constantly compared his experience with that of his ancestor. Although it was incredibly stressful, Danilov was held for just over two weeks and then was released and flew back to the US. This book intersperses Frolov’s story with the author’s own. I found it hard to put down. 

YouTube Channel: Moodi Foodi Berlin. Each video on this channel takes an in depth view of a street food vendor in Berlin, Germany. It popped into my YouTube feed recently, I watched for a few minutes and was hooked. Why did the algorithm show me this? I do watch a lot of cooking videos including some from Germany. That’s because I lived in that country for 3 years in the early 1980s, have returned on visits a few times, and always enjoyed the food and tried to duplicate it for home cooking. I haven’t seen any food trucks in the series. Instead, the vendors typically use small trailers that they tow with their small cars. The episode starts with the vendor pulling into a plaza, unhooking the trailer and getting ready for customers. It highlights vendors who mostly cook from scratch, right in the trailer. The food looks great but I expect speed of service is not a big consideration.