Here’s a fact that should give us pause: “Crime in Japan has become so rare that police often have nothing to do.  In 2015, there was just one gun homicide.  Guns are virtually illegal there.” (“News,” The Week, October 27, 2017 pg. 16.)  No wonder the Japanese have so ma

Recently, someone posted a remark by playwright Harold Pinter on Facebook.  It read, “How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I’ve never been able to write a happy play…”  I did a thesis on Pinter when I was

A new wave of innovation is hitting cyberspace which few of us know about and fewer will probably notice —  though the effect on everyday lives will be profound.  I write of Blockchain. Blockchain “…concatenates (or chains) cryptographically verified transactions into seq

Not long ago a celebrity made news by dying peacefully in his sleep.  A woman on Facebook noted his passing with the observation that people are destined to die the way they lived.  Her words were meant as a tribute to the deceased, but the statement went too far. Normally, I’d ha

Years ago, actress Dena Dietrich, dressed in Greco-Roman garb, her dark hair encircled in a crown of daisies appeared in a commercial for Chiffon margarine. “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she warned.  Then she stared into the camera, her eyebrow arched, leading us to un

Last week, I asked a retired friend how she planned to close out the summer.  She said she’d do what she always did, join friends at the annual play festival in Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is a quaint town in the middle of rural Oregon, dedicated to recreating Shakespeare’s Elizabet

If there is one area of expertise everyone feels they have, it’s in education.  All of us have been students in the classroom, right? We’ve all experienced good and bad teachers.  We know what we’d like to change.  But how to do it remains the question.  After Bill Clinton�

When I was in the 4th grade, I went from being a good student to being a dunce.  For some reason, I couldn’t master long division.  I fell to the bottom of the class in my teacher’s eyes and in my self-esteem.  The harder I tried, the more my frustration grew, ending in fear. 

Susan Stoner and I have been producing, Just Read it, a 10 minute YouTube book review series for over two years.  When I first proposed it, I doubted Susan or her cameraman husband, George, would be keen.  But they agreed to give it a try, and we’ve been having fun ever since.  W

Before the internet and Wikipedia, when I needed information, I dialed the reference librarian at my local library.  The materials I needed could be wide-ranging.  How to spell pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is one example.  Or, I might want to know the population of