I’ve always assumed a society should reflect the highest values of its citizen, which includes treating individuals with respect. Few would quarrel with that value, I think, until we turn our attention to the treatment of prisoners. Regrettably some people see jails as instruments o

I’ve often written about the advantages of growing older, but I won’t deny there are disadvantages, too. One of them is that we lose our financial acuity as we age. Unfortunately, unlike memory malfunctions, losing this skill is not easily perceived, according to writer Allan Roth

I went to a conference last weekend, one of those all day affairs that starts with coffee and bear claws, is followed by a high caloric lunch and ends with coffee and cookies in the late afternoon. To my right, at my table, sat a portly woman with a pleasant face. She was biting into

Scientists are beginning to think that play, rather than competition, is the ruling principle of the universe. Play, in this case, means an entity’s free exercise of its powers for no higher purpose than because it can. (“Do Atoms Play?” by David Graeber, The Baffler, excerpted

A friend of mine is going through some adversity at the moment. When we met for coffee, I did my best to cheer her up. Trouble, I reminded her, can be the source of insight. As she’s a writer, I pretended my remark would bring a smile to her lips. An artist is supposed to suffer, ri

Before she died, I had a phone conversation with my stepmother who was 98 years-old at the time. I asked her how her day was going and she cheerfully replied she’d had a wonderful morning visiting her mother and father. She wasn’t lying. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s diseas

If there’s a child anywhere in the world who hasn’t attended a gathering where ghost stories were told, I’d like to meet that extraordinary youngster. Scaring ourselves with tales from the grave is a rite of passage and given the number of horror films that are popular, we seem

Like Samson, Hillary Clinton admits the source of her political power lies in her hair. “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.”  What is it with women and hair? In the Middle East, they keep it under wraps. In art, we see it entwined around a

I have a friend who is old enough to be considering retirement, yet young enough for me to feel free to offer her advice about buying long term care insurance. As she is a mother who’s raised children alone and taken care of an ailing parent, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn I wa

When I was a junior in high school, studying biology was a requirement. The material was interesting but one picture in our text always sent shivers down my spine. The photograph was of a toad hatching little toads from holes on its back. For me, the picture was repulsive. For my pube