One wonders how Theater of the Absurd writers, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter or Bertolt Brecht would have treated Sergey Aleynikov’s life story. Aleynikov is a brilliant computer code writer who was arrested, not once, but twice based on complaints filed by his former employer, Gold
In 1994, philosophers Peter Singer and Paoula Cavalieri published The Great Ape Project which proposed that chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans be given the same rights as human beings. These primates share 98.7% of human DNA, they argue, which makes them nearly human. Unfor
Facebook, “…the single greatest possessor of customer data on the planet,” has recently lost one of its top executives to the National Security Agency (NSA). So writes Stanley Bing in Fortune magazine. (“Hey! Stop Watching Me!” by Stanley Bing, Fortune, July 2013, pg. 156) N
In my mid fifties I decided to take up painting. My maternal great-grandfather had been a well-known artists in Central America, earning his living as a painter of frescos on the walls and ceilings of churches and other public buildings. My mother also painted, though living in povert
The Trung people of Yunnan province in southwest China say they once had a written language “but a dog chewed up the dried animal skin on which it was recorded.” (“How to read the dictionary of an endangered language,” by Ross Perlin, Harper’s August 2013 pg. 70.) Ross Per
A new word has appeared in the English language which can’t be found in any of my dictionaries: de-extinction. It means to bring an extinct species back to life. The notion took fire in people’s imagination after Michael Crichton wrote his novel, Jurassic Park. In it, scientist us
I was having coffee with a friend, recently, Peter Kasting, a fellow author who, sadly, has stopped writing. His last book, written several years ago, was a work of science fiction: Journey of a Thousand Miles. In it, cities had mysteriously become poisoned wastelands, forcing survivo
I finally did it. I cut the subscription cord for two ladies magazines and have replaced them with one for Mother Jones. The change, I thought, would stir up the little grey cells. When the July/August edition came, it didn’t disappoint. One article by Josh Harkinson featured the ha
On my way to the park, there’s a news box where I often stop to bend down and scan the headlines. If a story interests me, I crouch a little more to peruse the fine print. Part of me feels guilty about reading the news for free, knowing people had to be paid to gather the informatio
“She threw Trompe l’Oeil against the wall when she’d finished.” The confession came from a friend whose daughter had read my novel for a book club. Her mother wanted to know if I had any consoling words. My first reaction was to be delighted that the daughter had read the bo