As if she were a character in a short story by Franz Kafka, Emily Dreyfus woke up one morning to discover she was a robot.  Instead of a face, she had an iPad screen.  Instead of eyes, she used a camera to guide her, though it lacked peripheral vision.  Instead of a mouth, she had

Donald Trump says Muslim’s in New Jersey cheered when the 911 towers went down.  Despite the lack of evidence, he continues to say it with great conviction.  Some people believe if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes true in some people’s minds.  Certainly, the dairy indust

I opened my computer recently to find an article about the actor, John Malkovich.  His latest commercial, it said, won’t be released for 100 years.  A snippet of the film provided shows the actor placing a bottle of perfume in a vault, then locking it.  In the next frame, presuma

One of the mixed blessings of the technological age is that we are trained to think in statistics and ratings figures.  A computer can measure and quantify large numbers, so, today, almost anything can be ranked, even the trivial.  “On a scale of 1- 10, how would rate your last oi

When I was in college, I became aware of a popular publication called, The Family of Man.   Between its covers were photographs from around the world, depicting how people in different countries, cultures and ages lived.  No words accompanied the photographs and  none were necessa

I subscribe to Vanity Fair because it gives me a glimpse of a world I cannot enter, the realm of the entitled and the pretenders.  Sometimes their antics amaze and amuse and sometimes, they confirm what I already know: that people everywhere are pretty much the same, except some make

Like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, I’m always in a hurry — which is peculiar because I’m retired.  Tell that to my circadian clock, whichever one it is that keeps me impatient and eager to get on with my invented projects.  When I was a child, my teachers warned m

Unlike Al Qaeda which took pains to avoid the World Wide Web and the digital age, fearing their movements could be tracked, Isis has embraced technology, employing it to inflate the organization’s profile and using it as a recruiting tool.  According to writer Jared Cohen, the orga

I opened an email the other day from my publisher.  Their note said they’d submitted my novel, Heart Land, for some book award.  If they’d had asked me, I’d have told them not to bother.  I don’t have much faith in awards.  Wherever people gather, politics is likely to fol