The beginning of a new year is a good time to take stock of the human race.  Frankly, I’m surprised we’re still around, having been in one conflict or another for the past 2000 years.   Beyond that, we spend a good deal of time thinking about money and are willing to gut the pl

The woman was screaming into the phone.  “How about I tell you what’s under…  my sink and in my medicine cabinet and you tell me how to use it.” (“Alias Jane,” by Cindy Wolfe Boynton, MS, Fall, 2018, pg. 39.) She needed an abortion and she needed it soon.  The year was

Here’s a surprising comment I discovered in a magazine, recently. “Research across industries shows that while there’s a modest correlation between grades and job performance the first year out of college, after a few years, the difference is ‘trivial’” (“Straight A’s

A few days before Christmas, I sat down to lunch with a friend of many years who is religious.  He’s aware I’m an atheist, but that gives piquancy to our conversations.   As we were sitting amidst holiday decorations, he seemed unable to refrain from saying, “I don’t know h

The week of George Herbert Bush’s funeral showed us an America divided.  Republicans, the party of disgruntled whites, lionized the deceased president in an effort to reclaim the moral high ground.  Democrats spent their time pointing to the gaping disparity between the conduct of

Is the Bible the word of God or manmade?    A Kenyan minister and I were debating that point on Facebook, recently.  During the course of our exchange, I pointed out European missionaries had brought Christianity to Africa.  For some reason he refused to accept that reality and t

Poor Barbara Streisand.  While promoting her new music album  Wall, she made a boo-boo.  She said white women didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election because they didn’t know their minds and followed the advice of their husbands.  The remark  caught

With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas ahead. probably no one wants to hear about managing diet.  Of least interest might  be a discussion regarding salt.  Still, salt deserves our attention.  It  has a deadly link to  plastic.  That’s what researchers from South Korea’s

In my upcoming memoir, I write about my second measles infection at the age of twenty-two. The occasion was memorable because it was my first brush with  Britain’s National Health Service.  The time was 1960, so the system, put in place in 1948, had been around for a while.  To b

Brain training with games,  I wrote in an earlier blog, (Blog 9/17/15) showed little evidence the activity could make our thinking sharper.  The skills learned weren’t transferable to other activities, the argument went.   Despite these conclusions, some researchers continued wi