11Nov 27, 2017
Okay, I tried. I really tried to get into Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Well to be honest, I gave up after the first chapter bored me out of my gourd. I will sit through the brickbats of the literati, but keep in mind, I am 68 years old, not in the best of health, and […]
12Nov 11, 2017
I put the question mark in the title because the whole idea seems offensive. And yet there may be something to it. I read a comparison between primitive hunter-gatherer societies and chimpanzees. In small hunter-gatherer tribes, everyone knows everyone, sees what they do, and uses peer pressure, ostracism, and finally collective force to compel the […]
13Nov 2, 2017
It’s happened again, this time with a truck. Sayfullo Saipov drove a truck into a group of bicylcists in Lower Manhattan, killing eight and injuring 11. While the shoot-from-the-lip president promptly blamed our immigration policy, early investigation shows that Saipov came from Uzbekistan–which is not on Trump’s terror watchlist–and that he was radicalized after he […]
14Oct 29, 2017
I must now make a shameful confession: I have never, until now, read Henry David Thoreau. In school, the mandatory oral book reports led me to think that the entire class read Walden, or Life in the Woods. (Though I am now cynical enough to suspect a dog-eared and passed-around Cliff Notes of the same.) […]
15Oct 23, 2017
Years ago, in Hamilton, NJ, a candidate for the local governing body campaigned against a contract the township was about to sign, I think it was about garbage collection. The contract was approved and signed. Then he got elected with enough of a slate to make a difference on government policy, and I asked him […]