Rich Shertenlieb announces fund-raising venture after wife's cancer diagnosis
As Shertenlieb's longtime listeners know, cancer research is a deeply personal cause for his family. Shertenlieb's wife, Mary, is a three-time cancer survivor. She was diagnosed with a recurrence of leukemia in November, 12 years after her initial diagnosis.
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'The people at Dana-Farber Cancer Center saved my wife's life, are attempting to save it again, so this is the only way I know how to give back,' said Shertenlieb in an email.
In his video announcing the new venture, Shertenlieb — who said he will be participating in the Pan-Mass Challenge this year — elaborated briefly on what his wife faces. 'She is one of the toughest people on the planet,' he said.
He said he can't put into words his appreciation for how important Dana-Farber has been to his wife and family. 'I don't know how you pay back somebody for saving the life of somebody you love,' he said, 'but this is how I'm going to try.'
Chad Finn can be reached at
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CBS News
2 days ago
- CBS News
Casa Sensei serves up Latin-Asian fusion and waterfront views for Dine Out Lauderdale
Casa Sensei, located in the heart of Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale, blends Latin American soul with Pan-Asian flair, and it's not shy about it. With dining available indoors and dockside, the restaurant offers a vibrant mix of flavors and scenery that keeps locals coming back. Now, as part of the Dine Out Lauderdale program — featuring 110 participating restaurants — Casa Sensei is serving up serious flavor at a serious value. Guests can enjoy three-course lunches for $35 and dinners for $45, making it one of the most buzzed-about stops on the culinary tour. Camila Clark, Vice President of Communications for Visit Lauderdale, said the program was "an opportunity for residents and visitors alike to come and experience our unique dining opportunities." She added that over the past decade, the initiative had evolved to "provide an elevated dining experience for visitors and residents." Executive Chef Will Reyes fills the table with standout dishes from the Dine Out Lauderdale menu, emphasizing that it's all about the community. "Our locals were very important to us," he said. "That's why we did this, for the community, of course, to attract our local customers so they could come and enjoy our food for an affordable price." Guests called Casa Sensei a local favorite. One diner told us, "It was delicious. It was my second time there that week — we went Monday and then again Wednesday. So good." Another guest, Shay Heavens, praised the variety: "The fusion was great — you could find a little bit of everything there." Appetizers on both the lunch and dinner menus include savory pork dumplings, vibrant tuna poke, elevated blue crab Rangoon, a delicate truffle butter crunch roll, and wok-sautéed salt and pepper prawns sourced from Key West. The portion sizes are large. Main courses are just as bold. The oversized Kung Fu lo mein is packed with diced chicken, mushrooms, bean sprouts, green beans, and bell peppers. The oversized, moist, and perfectly executed Grilled Scottish Salmon comes with tomato-cucumber salad and a colorful vegetable medley. Dessert ends with a whimsical touch, a complimentary puff of cotton candy. Elegant, indulgent treats round out the Dine Out menu, making Casa Sensei a must-visit during the program, which runs Aug. 1 through the end of September. To learn more about Casa Sensei, click here and for more on Dine Out Lauderdale, go here.
Washington Post
26-07-2025
- Washington Post
‘Pan' is funny, insightful and a little unhinged
On the face of it, Michael Clune's 'Pan' appears to traverse rather straightforward territory. At the dawn of the 1990s, a teenage boy in a Midwestern suburb is sent to live with his father after his parents' divorce. He begins to suffer panic attacks. He meets new friends, starts experimenting with drugs in a secluded hayloft he and those friends refer to as 'the barn,' and … well, to describe it any further in those terms would be a complete violation of what 'Pan' is actually about. Clune's vision here is essentially religious, and I don't mean religious in the way that Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic writer or Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Jewish one. I mean, rather, that 'Pan' is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit, the sort of holy mania one finds in writers like William Blake or Christopher Smart. The effect, to the extent one can refer to it as merely an 'effect,' is dazzling. Clune, a celebrated memoirist, delivers with 'Pan' a debut novel that is at once startlingly funny and radiantly — if here and there a little perplexingly — strange. The prose is colloquial and direct — Clune's narrator, Nick, is 15 and speaks the argot of an ordinary teenager — and yet somehow everywhere Nick's eye alights the world feels like it's being flayed bare. In a classroom, he notes: 'Winter in Illinois, the flesh comes off the bones, what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night. At noon we could look at our own faces. All the basic shapes were there, in bone.' It's a mood, and a style, that could easily become exhausting if it were not so perfectly matched not just to Nick's panic attacks but to the mock-heroic register of adolescence in general. Because it is, Nick's encounters with teenage effluvia take on a revelatory intensity: Boston's 'More Than a Feeling' is 'just a quiet glitter of melody, a whisper of rhythm. Like a glass man, striding alongside the car, bones tinkling'; at his after-school job at Ace Hardware, he looks to avoid 'the three stigmata of idleness … the hanging hands, the half-open mouth, the unfocused eyes.' It's tempting to say that nothing much happens in this novel, but for the fact that everything that does happen is charged with so much fearsome grandeur that even the book's micro-movements feel operatic. Whatever 'Pan' might lack in terms of old-fashioned narrative mechanics, it more than makes up for in humor, particularity and what I am forced to refer to simply as meaning. Nick comes to believe that his panic attacks are not merely medical events but rather instances when he is being possessed by the spirit of the Greek god Pan. This rather baroque conceit is not so much a matter of plot — whether he is or isn't ultimately seems beside the point — but it thoroughly destabilizes any attempt to read 'Pan' through a modish lens of mental health or disability. 'Because a panic attack doesn't feel like a panic attack,' Nick observes at one point. 'It feels like insight.' Insight, indeed, is what 'Pan' offers in spades, and part of what makes it so delicious is the way it mulches up both the familiar materials of millennial adolescence ('Gilligan's Island' reruns, crappy after-school jobs, the video game 'Ghosts 'n Goblins') and more esoteric ones ('Ivanhoe,' Giovanni Bellini's painting 'Drunkenness of Noah,' a fantasy novel called 'Nifft the Lean') into something that feels at once semi-typically earthy and decidedly cosmic, at times very nearly unhinged. This quality of insight is what art is for, but it is so rare at this point that 'Pan' feels almost like a work of outsider art. Ultimately, it's not, but the novel's brilliant intensity is such that it grows difficult to describe or boil down to its constituent parts. When Nick's friend Ian unpacks a theory of what he calls 'Solid Mind' ('when your thoughts flow in grooves, built deep into your brain. You don't even notice them') it feels both like the hilarious, weed-addled invention of almost any suburban teenager and like an intense theory of cognitive behavior that might belong to this book alone. It's a doubleness that makes Clune's novel approachable and inviting but also wild enough to seem practically avant-garde. Perhaps that's a quality not all readers will be inclined to prize — 'Pan' might be expressionist enough to disorient a traditional reader yet formalist enough to frustrate an avant-gardist. But for those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer (and perhaps for those who, rather tediously, have chosen lately to litigate the question of whether novels have abandoned male experience and male readers), 'Pan' is exhilarating, a pure joy — and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror — from end to end. Matthew Specktor is the author, most recently, of 'The Golden Hour.'
Boston Globe
16-07-2025
- Boston Globe
Are they panic attacks, or visitations from an ancient Greek God?
All of this makes Clune sound like Jonathan Franzen, a cartographer of Midwestern schools and suburbs. But if 'Pan' is a work of realism — and that's an open and interesting question — then it's interested primarily not in the realities of social existence (what it's like to live in a particular time and place) but in the realities of consciousness (what it's like to think in a particular way). Early in 'Pan,' Nick starts having what he comes to understand are panic attacks. Sitting in geometry class, he realizes that his hand is a thing, just like the textbook and eraser he sees in front of him: 'That's when I forgot how to breathe.' Soon after, he's watching 'The Godfather III' when he forgets 'how to move blood through [his] body.' He begins worrying that, if he stares at something or someone too long, his 'looking,' or his 'thinking,' or his very self (it's hard to tell them apart), will escape from his head and stick to what he's staring at. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up How does subjectivity, the ineffable feeling of being a person, arise from the material brain and its measurable neural firings? How is it that thinking takes place within time and yet seems to remove us from time? (There's Augustine again.) Think too much about thinking and these questions, and you, start falling apart. Nick is 'a pragmatist' (there's William James again), and 'Pan' follows the strategies he develops to deal with his panic and insomnia: note the symptoms that precipitate an attack; breathe into a paper bag; meditate. Advertisement Interwoven with this rather straightforward, if effective, story of mental health and its treatment is a wilder, stronger strand. Nick hooks up with a group of cool — read: trouble-maker — friends. They start hanging out in a family barn they call, with equal parts irony and mythic seriousness, the Barn. There, they do drugs (Nick doesn't; he's read they can trigger panic attacks), listen to music, engage in rituals (dancing, more drugs, sex), and decide that Nick has been inhabited by the Greek god Pan. As Ian, the group's ringleader, declares, 'When you are aware of the panic, you are seeing the truth of ordinary life' with 'absolute clarity.' Panic isn't a condition to be managed; it's a divine possession to be embraced. It shows us the truths — the subject is an object; selves are porous to one another; 'time was part of the body after all' — that we normally refuse to see. Advertisement Nick is regularly described as being 'loose,' ready at any moment to drift from his mind and the world. 'Pan' is, in many ways, a loose novel. It refuses to be one thing or the other; its plot moves — Nick tries out new ways of controlling panic; his friends come up with wilder theories about panic's sacredness — but at its own strange pace. Is the claim that Pan is real and within Nick meant to be taken literally? Or is it a metaphor to describe how we are visited by thoughts that seem beyond us? Yes and yes. Clune doesn't choose between what we might describe as the poetic and the novelistic, the mystic and the naturalistic, explanations of Nick's experience. When it comes to time and consciousness, Clune's perennial topics, visionary perception is perhaps just a deeper form of realism. Advertisement Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the books columnist for Commonweal. His reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. PAN By Michael Clune Penguin Press, 336 pages, $29
