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About Barbara
I’m Barbara Falconer Newhall and I’ve got a serious case of the human condition.
I’ve done it all: career, family, house, garden, and a prize-winning book, "Wrestling with God." The result: I'm a woman of years, lots of them, who can't help seeing things from the funny side.
Tucked away on this website are hundreds of riffs on life. I hope you’ll seek them out – and keep me company as I discover the humor, if not the meaning, in what life throws my way. Learn More
BARBARA’S BOOK
★ Publishers Weekly, starred review
Any seeker of any faith will be blessed to read the words of this fine author and observer. Read more.
An inveterate doubter for most of her adult life, journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall embarks upon a quest to find a way to believe in God in the twenty-first century.
The result is Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith, which details her search for the Divine in the lives of diverse Americans – from a fundamentalist Christian to a progressive Muslim to a Buddhist monk.Seekers of all persuasions will feel represented here, from priests, ministers, and rabbis to engineers, physicists, and avowed non-believers . . . a riverflow of a book. — Phil Cousineau, host of PBS’s Global Spirit
Recent Riffs on Life
Too Many Angry Diatribes. Not Enough Tact. Why?
On the air and in cyberspace: too many angry diatribes, not enough tact. Do we — you and I — really want to tone things down? Read more.
My Husband Was Bald — And Then He Wasn’t
With the covid shutdown, Jon stopped going to the hairdresser. Soon he wasn’t as bald as we thought he was. Read more.
DON’T MISS!
The Lost Art of the Telephone Conversation — Here’s What Happened to It. Sheltering at Home Week 14
I know why young people do all that texting. It’s because 21st-century wireless phones make for a lousy telephone conversation, and kids want to — talk. Read more.
Twenty Seconds: What’s Good for the Hands Is Good for the Potatoes. Right? Sheltering at Home Week 3
COVID-19 is out there. It could get me, which is why I’m doing a lot of weird stuff lately. Like soaping down the potatoes. For twenty seconds, of course. Read more.
Do Books Have Rights? This One Didn’t. I Threw It in the Trash.
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Into the trash with this adorable mousey book! Photo by BF. Newhall[/caption]
It was a book, a children’s book. But I dumped it in the garbage anyway. I threw it out the way I would toss out a dead flashlight battery or a slab of moldy cheddar. Read more.