I’ve followed my hair dresser around as she relocated from shop to shop for a number of years. Tipping her was never in question as she was an employee working on salary. A year ago, she moved to a location where she owns her chair — which means she rents the space but is her

Technology continues to change the landscape faster than social conventions can adjust, which creates a gap, a lawless frontier where tech companies can do what they like. For example, who gave them permission to monetize our private information? If stalking us on the internet to dete

The world has become an uncomfortably small place. In the past, habits and cultures of other nations seemed little more than a curiosity to those of us who lived separated from the other continents by two oceans. Our friends in Canada were too like us to bear comparison and, mostly, w

Sipping lattes in a bookstore, a retired friend and I talked about the exploding global population and the dwindling resources of the planet.   By 2022, India’s inhabitants will exceed 1.4 billion. By 2050, our species will have grown from the current 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion. T

Before I moved to the retirement center, I lived in a 1896 clapboard Victorian home with no central heating or air conditioning. In the winter, I kept warm by using electric wall heaters and in summer, I turned on overhead fans. The system met my needs on most days, but when summer he

In the 1960s, while living and working as a teacher in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), I spent two weeks on holiday in Cape Town. The city was beautiful and modern. Except for apartheid, I might have been in any major center in the world. Nonetheless, the country’s strict adherence t

The small abortion clinic in my community is so quiet, one might assume it had gone out of business. It hasn’t, but the protesters have disappeared like fruit flies in winter. Even the grey-haired old man who used to carry a picket sign to and fro on the pavement has probably gone t

I have a friend who bought animal heads at a garage sale, once. He hung them in his den then invited me to admire the display. Frankly, I found a room filled with decapitated heads to be eerie and could no more understand why a person would hang carcasses on a wall than I could unders

Of late, I’ve been wondering if I’ve gone to sleep and awakened to find myself in another dimension. The thawing of conservative attitudes has overwhelmed my powers of belief. Yet the thawing is real and I see glimpses of a glorious world forming. Iran and the West have agreed to

“Consuming the world is not the same as understanding it.” So writes Charles King in, “The Decline of International Studies,” (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2015 pg.92.) The United States leads in technology and data mining, which includes NSA and private companies like Datamin