Below are three accounts of rescue that should give us pause. Story 1 A parrot has been sitting on the roof of its owner’s home for 3 days, refusing to come down. Eventually, the north London Fire Department arrives to rescue the bird, but none of their ploys succeed.  Finally, a f

Around three o’clock each afternoon at my retirement center, a gaggle of residents gathers around the coffee machine to discuss, for an hour, the state of the world.  I don’t usually join them because it’s the time I exercise.  Sometimes, I pause long enough to grab a

Is America becoming more conservative or more liberal? That depends upon how you read the demographics.  Four out of five Americans live in urban areas, (“Notes” The Week, August 17/24, 2018, pg. 16), and if your believe  a report in the Washington Post, urban areas tend to vote

I may have been born before my time, but  at 82, I’m not too old to rejoice in the recent development of  fertility phone aps.   How wonderful that a young woman can have at her fingertips a device to help her decide when and if she wants to become pregnant.  Or, how to avoid p

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years.  They may have managed it because they had  small brains.  They didn’t possess enough grey matter to imagine how to tinker with their environment.  Homo sapiens used theirs  to disrupt the planet.  So many changes are  far f

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

  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, a former student contacted me.  She was organizing a high school reunion which included several of my former pupils.  She provided the time, date and location of the gathering, then asked if  I’d care to attend.  I was flattered, naturally, but more touched by her clos

In a recent article, Megan McArdle, a onetime Ralph Nader supporter now turned Libertarian, argues the time has come to throw out  Row v. Wade, the High Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States.  (Click) To support her position, she points to Ruth Bader Ginsberg