When I was a kid, my friends and I spoke in pig Latin when we wanted privacy while others were present.   The rules were simple and familiar to many, though in our smugness, we weren’t aware of that until our 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Brown, slapped us down with a few pig Latin phra

Several years ago, an English friend let drop he’d been knighted by the Queen and given the highest rank of Most Noble Order of the Garter.  I was so impressed, I made Sir Ian Dunbar, my friend, a magistrate in my novel, Gothic Spring, and charged him with the task of conducting th

I’ve always wondered how a company famous as a tire manufacturer got into the culinary business and had the power to make or break the reputation of a famous chef.  According to writer Sam Kashner, the business began in 1900 when two brothers, competitive auto racers, invented deta

One of my readers, unhappy with my last two blogs on political correctness (blogs 6/23/15 & 8/10/15), sent me an article from the Atlantic Monthly which opposed my view.  (“The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Kukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Atlantic Monthly, September 2

I may have mentioned earlier that the house cleaning chicks at the retirement center where I live laugh at my flip top cell phone because it does nothing but allow me to make phone calls. Yesterday I found the pair of them on a  break, crouching against a wall.  Neither was talking.

Do unicorns exist? In Silicon Valley, they do.  Unicorns are tech start-ups that begin with a billion dollars or more of venture capital behind them.  In fact, there are more unicorns  there than  Harry Potter has seen in his world because, at the moment, tech is ripe with specula

I wish I could mandate that only those who have lived in poverty be allowed to make laws regarding the poor. In “Getting Jobbed,” Virginia Sole-Smith outlines the absurdities that result when myths about the poor are translated into law by the Congress.  (Harper’s, October, 201

I want to pose a question: How can we develop Artificial Intelligence when our own intelligence is questionable; when we can’t agree on standards of behavior or ethical goals; when we  know little about how our brains work; can’t define intelligence and have no idea what consciou

I’ve said nothing about the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East and the refugees who are fleeing from almost certain death.   What have I to contribute to the discussion?  Failed solutions of the past are already being revisited.  We can harden our hearts to the misery, as Isra