Scary as it sounds, we humans have the capacity to change the course of evolution. That’s the opinion of Jennifer Doudna, one of the discoverers of CRSPR technology. (The Ultimate Life Hacker,” by Gideon Rose, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2018, pg. 158.) CRSPR is the ability t
I know what dehydration means, especially among the old. More than once, I’ve sat in a local hospital’s emergency room while my ancient mother has needles stuck in her veins to restore bodily fluids. She never was good at drinking water. A cup or two of heavily sugared tea i
With Congress expressing so much concern about Russian interference in the 2016 election, it’s surprising to read the U. S. Senate turned down a proposal to spend additional money to secure our voting system. Certainly, we have fallen behind in maintaining both it and the nation
A former student of mine, now in his early 60s, visited me for coffee, recently. We tried to avoid discussing politics, but it was the elephant in the room. Eventually, my “young” friend admitted he found the antics in Washington, D. C. depressing. Knowing he was a liberal D
How in the world did our Supreme Court come to the conclusion that corporations were people? Citizens United The debate over whether they are or not had been going on for 200 years, though I little knew it. As late as 1914, in a case before the Michigan Supreme Court, a brewery lo
As one who supports a woman’s right to choose, I listen to speculations about whether or not the U. S. Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that granted a woman the right to an abortion. Some pundits are complacent. They argue that after 45 years, Roe v. Wade
I once negotiated a labor contract while wearing my dress turned inside out. I didn’t realize my mistake, but after we’d concluded our session, the negotiator from the opposite site of the table walked with me to the street. “Say,” he muttered as a motorcycle growled by, “
Sometimes, I forget a web larger than the world-wide web exists. You know the one I’m talking about. Nature, that place where every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That place where a butterfly flaps its wings in Argentina and Japan suffers a tsunami. To be ho
Recently, I got entangled with a company’s phone representative for whom English was a second language. Both her grammar and her accent made communication difficult. Finally, she brought her supervisor on the line. His, too, was hard to understand. “Do you live in the Unit
I might have told this story before. If so, forgive me: While on a bus, touring France, my traveling companions and I stopped at a small café. We’d been sitting for three hours, so all twenty of us made a beeline for the toilets the moment we disembarked. Confronted by two