Recently, the sultan of Brunei  decreed that the country will return to the harshest form of Islamic Sharia law, a ruling to be imposed upon Christians and Buddhists alike who make up 30% of the country’s population.  Besides jailing and flogging, limb amputations will be imposed

Today I’m uncertain about whether or not I’ve done a good thing or a bad thing.  A friend has completed his second novel and I have encouraged him to send it out to publishers.  His first book was self-published and he seemed happy enough with that launch, so who am I to interfe

I’ve always been a saver.  I thank my dad for the habit.  When I was about 8 or 9, he marched me — still clutching my birthday money — into Bank of America to open a savings account.  Ours was a small town but even so, when I saw the carpeted interior and marble pilla

Twenty years ago, after a 100 days of slaughter, Rwanda’s ethnic war left the country in ruins.  So many men had been killed that women made up 70% of the population.   The boys who grew up during the struggle watched as their mothers faced enormous hardships to feed their famili

As I read the latest edition of The New Republic which featured remarks about three writers — FranzKafka,  Karl Ove Knausgaard and Virginia Woolf — I concluded they all agreed that writing is work.  Kafka struggled deep into the night so that he might labor without distr

Silly as it seems, I’ve begun to feel a growing curiosity about the fate of my books.  (See blog 1/13/14)  I wonder where they go when they are sold.  Did the readers enjoy them?  Were the books shared with friends or left abandoned in the rain?  (See blog 12/6/13)  Recently o

Actress Diane Keaton has a new memoir out, “Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty.” In it she goes over her now familiar history: her love affairs with Warren Beatty, Al Pacino and Woody Allen, for example.  She talks, too, about aging and about one blog writer’s comment that was

It’s been 25 years since Salman Rushdie published his novel Satanic Verses and Iran’s head of state, the Ayatollah Khomeini, responded by charging him with blasphemy and placing a death sentence upon his head. Not surprisingly, Rushdie went into hiding when he heard the news.  Th

When Senator Diane Feinstein expressed her outrage at Edward Snowden because he’d failed to take his concern about the NSA through the proper channels and reached out to the press,  she was guilty of short term memory loss. In 2001, William Binney, a 30 year-old veteran of the agen

Edward Snowden’s revelations about our government’s indiscriminate spying has rekindled the debate about research and ethics.  Tom Leinster, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland challenges the opinions of some of his colleagues when they insist t