I’ve just finished Part II of Larry McMurtry’s autobiography, Literary Life, and found it contained many surprises. One would think the author of Lonesome Dove and 29 other novels, a man who has won the Pulitzer Prize and written dozens of screenplays, including Broke Back Mountai

On June 9 of this year, the writer Michael Lewis gave the commencement speech at Princeton, his alma mater. In it he made an observation about luck that went viral on the web. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. The truth of his st

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago questioning that religion was the sole basis for morality. (6/12/12) In my view, societies developed moral codes to provide cohesion and safety for its members. I was speculating, of course, as I have no degree in sociology or anthropology. So imagine my

I AM A SICK MAN…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. So begins Fyodor Dostoevsky’s narrator in, Notes from the Underground. Certainly, the author has developed one of the most unpleasant characters in literature — not the most

I ran across a quote the other day that brought me up short. An artist is an artist because he is not happy with the world, so he creates his own existence. (Robin Gibb, quoted in Billboard.com, reprinted in The Week, 6/8/12 pg 19.) I’ve long heard that a great artist has to suffer,

Larry McMurtry and I shall never meet, yet I’m certain we’re kindred spirits. I picked up the second of his three-book memoir at the Dollar Store the other day. I’d never read any of his work, though I knew he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove and that he wrote the sc

In 1957 Vance Packard wrote a best seller called The Hidden Persuaders. It recounted claims by market researcher James M. Vicary who insisted that consumer choices could be influenced through subliminal messaging. Words or images flashed on a theater screen, he said, would result in h

I decided to shake up my world a little by letting one of my women’s magazine subscriptions lapse. I wanted to subscribe to something different. Instead of More I signed up for Scientific American Mind. I haven’t regretted my decision. The information the May/June edition was inte

I thought I knew what I was doing when I began a new career in my 70’s. I am retired. My income meets my needs. What better time to explore new terrains? Though I felt confident about this new direction, as I reflect back, I realize I was, and probably still am, something of a child

An essay titled “The Headscarf as a Feminist Statement,” caught my eye the other day. Nadiya Takolia had written a spirited defense of her right to wear the hijab, an Islamic scarf that conceals a woman’s hair yet leaves her face exposed. She calls her decision a radical act bec