Is globalization good or bad?  Will it create a kinder, gentler and more equitable world?  Or, will nation-states be forced to live under the tyranny of a universal cabal?  According to Randall Schweller, professor of political science at Ohio State University, Donald Trump and his

I recently upgraded my computer.  The new hard drive resides in a box the size of a deck of playing cards. When my installer finished his work, he stood back, with his arms folded.  “You’re going to love this,” he assured me.  “It’s so much faster.” Sadly, “faster”

Last month the “rent” at my retirement center went up 4%.  That’s greater than the living increase from my social security and pension income.  Being retired and living off fixed benefits, I’m wondering how I should anticipate further increases, particularly if I proved to b

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been adapting to a new computer.  Some mischief-makers attacked my old one.  The new machine has a hard drive the size of a pack of playing cards, and it’s faster, too  The bad news is, I never entirely committed all my passwords  to paper,

Around three o’clock each afternoon at my retirement center, a gaggle of residents gathers around the coffee machine to discuss, for an hour, the state of the world.  I don’t usually join them because it’s the time I exercise.  Sometimes, I pause long enough to grab a

  September 11  is a day when our nation remembers one of the worst foreign attacks on its soil, a day that ushered in a never-ending war against terrorism.  But there are other ways to threaten our democracy besides bombing our structures.  In fact, one political threat goes

Is America becoming more conservative or more liberal? That depends upon how you read the demographics.  Four out of five Americans live in urban areas, (“Notes” The Week, August 17/24, 2018, pg. 16), and if your believe  a report in the Washington Post, urban areas tend to vote

I may have been born before my time, but  at 82, I’m not too old to rejoice in the recent development of  fertility phone aps.   How wonderful that a young woman can have at her fingertips a device to help her decide when and if she wants to become pregnant.  Or, how to avoid p

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years.  They may have managed it because they had  small brains.  They didn’t possess enough grey matter to imagine how to tinker with their environment.  Homo sapiens used theirs  to disrupt the planet.  So many changes are  far f

Scary as it sounds, we humans have the capacity to change the course of evolution.  That’s the opinion of Jennifer Doudna, one of the discoverers of CRSPR technology.  (The Ultimate Life Hacker,” by Gideon Rose, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2018, pg. 158.)  CRSPR is the ability t