Innocence of Muslims, the film by the Egyptian born American citizen Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, exposes again that delicate balance in this country between free speech and how far a government should go to protect that right. We’ve confronted the question before, for example, when the

I’ve advocated before that we can accomplish global changes by beginning with ourselves. Recently, a new book has been published on this subject: Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living (Published by Union of Concerned Scientists) In it one will find steps an individua

One of my recent books finds from the Dollar Store is a Four Corners mystery, Earthway by Amée and David Thurlo. What attracted me to the book was Tony Hillerman’s endorsement on the jacket. Hillerman, now deceased, was best known for his Navajo Tribal Police mysteries which featur

Folks on my Facebook page are suffering from nostalgia. Of late, I’ve seen lots of pictures of obsolete items that probably belong in a history museum, like the foot treadle for a non-electric sewing machine. The quaintness of these objects fills me with pleasant memories and makes

I came across an interesting statistic about newspapers the other day.  Even in their current moribund condition, newspapers in their print and digital formats are still read by about 75 percent of the adult population. (“The Only Game in Town,” by David Sirota, Harper

I came across an article from the journal of Psychology and Aging the other day about risk taking. The report said that by the age of 50 most of us stop looking for challenges, behavior, they argue, which ages us. (AARP, July 2012, pg. 62) Frankly, I would have thought the reverse was

Literature’s power is to carry us safely to places we wouldn’t ordinarily go. One of those places is the world of taboos. For centuries, writers have dared venture into forbidden territory, creating some of the world’s great classics. Two examples are D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Cha

On August 27, I wrote a blog entitled, “A Government is Not a Business.” Recently, writer Todd Purdam echoed similar sentiments in the September issue of Vanity Fair, but he added one observation that escaped me: that a business, like the military, is a hierarchical institution wh

For all the reading I do, I don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper. We have only one in our town and I don’t care much for it. Having been a politician for several years, I’ve had to work with journalists of all political persuasion and long ago lost my faith in journalistic objec

“Delusional” is the only way I can characterize Madonna Behen’s article, “Secrets to Stress-Free Doctor Visits,” which appeared in the August edition of Woman’s Day. (pg. 93). First of all, for me, a stress free doctor visit is a contradiction in terms. Either I’m in the