I’ve been invited to be a panelist at a women’s conference in November. Four generations of participants will discuss how the women’s movement has changed their lives. I represent the past, of course, so I decided to refresh my memory by rereading Betty Friedan’s seminal book,

“Apparently, the Marine Corps thinks a ‘lack or loss of spiritual faith’ could be dangerous.” So writes Dana Liebelson in an article for Yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/u-military-problem-atheists-065000534.html. The inference is part of a Marine training document that has b

“Someone else’s success isn’t your failure,” a person wisely wrote on the Facebook recently. Good advice. Still, at almost 77, I admit to envy. That slant-eyed villain works hand-in-hand with my insecurity. What’s more, my life as a writer fosters self-doubt. Each manuscript

One wonders how Theater of the Absurd writers, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter or Bertolt Brecht would have treated Sergey Aleynikov’s life story. Aleynikov is a brilliant computer code writer who was arrested, not once, but twice based on complaints filed by his former employer, Gold

In 1994, philosophers Peter Singer and Paoula Cavalieri published The Great Ape Project which proposed that chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans be given the same rights as human beings. These primates share 98.7% of human DNA, they argue, which makes them nearly human. Unfor

Facebook, “…the single greatest possessor of customer data on the planet,” has recently lost one of its top executives to the National Security Agency (NSA). So writes Stanley Bing in Fortune magazine. (“Hey! Stop Watching Me!” by Stanley Bing, Fortune, July 2013, pg. 156) N

In my mid fifties I decided to take up painting. My maternal great-grandfather had been a well-known artists in Central America, earning his living as a painter of frescos on the walls and ceilings of churches and other public buildings. My mother also painted, though living in povert

The Trung people of Yunnan province in southwest China say they once had a written language “but a dog chewed up the dried animal skin on which it was recorded.” (“How to read the dictionary of an endangered language,” by Ross Perlin, Harper’s August 2013 pg. 70.)  Ross Per

A new word has appeared in the English language which can’t be found in any of my dictionaries: de-extinction. It means to bring an extinct species back to life. The notion took fire in people’s imagination after Michael Crichton wrote his novel, Jurassic Park. In it, scientist us

I was having coffee with a friend, recently, Peter Kasting, a fellow author who, sadly, has stopped writing. His last book, written several years ago, was a work of science fiction: Journey of a Thousand Miles. In it, cities had mysteriously become poisoned wastelands, forcing survivo