A bit of scrolling up and down the column on the left of this page will show you most of the covers of the more than 60 operiodicals in which my 500-plus non-academic publications have so far appeared. These periodicals are quite diverse. Many are for professionals in various fields. Others are for specific lay readerships. Still others are for a broader public. The periodicals are published in (in descending order) the Netherlands, the US, Belgium, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Britain, Israel, Australia, and Switzerland.
Although I'm a native New Yorker living in New York, more than half of my features are in Dutch. I did a lot in the Netherlands and continue to write in that language. (Als je deze zin kunt lezen, dan ben je des te meer van harte welkom!) All my other articles are in English, except for a few I wrote in German and one or two in Afrikaans.
Most of the fields I write about are not surprising in view of my academic background.
More than 100 of my publications have been about dreaming and other aspects of sleep, as well as depth psychology in general. Many have appeared in specialized magazines. Most of my dream-related publications were features appearing every weekend for a couple of years in De Telegraaf, the largest newspaper in the Netherlands.
A couple dozen of my features have dealt with architecture and industrial design, most notably in the Dutch industrial design magazine Product. Particularly topical was my writing on the controversy about the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Add to this my many articles on scale modeling, mostly focusing on my skyscraper city Mini-Gotham.
Several of my publications deal with language. About verbal language in dreams, to be sure, but also occasional features about George Orwell's Newspeak, the Tourette syndrome, and the language of the unconscious.
Dozens of my features involve medicine. Some have been published in professional periodicals for medical doctors and specialists, notably psychiatrists. Other medical-related features have appeared in periodicals for a more general readership. Particularly topical were my articles relating to the AIDS epidemic, the anthrax scare, and most notably the recent Covid pandemic. Many of my medical features have been published in Jewish newspapers across the US and in a half dozen other countries. These focused on Judaism and Jewish doctors, drawing upon material in my book Jews and Medicine.
What I never would have dreamt when I began writing was that over half my features would be about dentistry – a field in which I have no background whatever. This all began as a fluke, namely, my chance discovery and purchase of an historically important DDS diploma. My writing about this find led to a snowball effect, with (to date) more than 300 features, all non-clinical, in periodicals for dentists, and also magazines for dental assistants and lab technicians.
As can be imagined, when I have to write a new dental feature every month for 25 years, the topics I come up with are extremely diverse and of the sort seldom seen in dental magazines anywhere in the world. To give just a handful of topics: the evolution of the first teeth from fish scales; Doc Holliday (DDS) and the gunfight at the OK Corral; bite marks as forensic evidence; dental and oral sounds in spoken languages; the origin of the tooth fairy; poison-contaminated toothpaste; Stalin and his dentist; ivory and endangered elephants; ethical dilemmas in dental practice.
And there are some non-academic publications of mine which don't fall into the above categories, such as the physics of Einstein, the philosophy of Spinoza, the Dutch colonial remnants of Brooklyn.
If you wish to know more about any of the above, please feel free to contact me. (See Contact page.)