Now that we’re over the shock of Eric Cantor losing his House seat, we’re awakening to the realization that immigration reform, which he supported, won’t happen anytime soon.  Money will continue to be wasted building a wall along our southern border.  Rather than argue agains

Most people were surprised by the political defeat of Eric Cantor in the Virginia Republican primary recently.  Political pundits the previous night had yawned as they predicted the outcome: a cakewalk for Cantor.  That’s the problem with pundits.  They have no special wisdom. 

Every year I pay  to have someone prepare my taxes.  I don’t use TurboTax because a friend’s experience left him tied in knots and feeling as if he’d been forced to waltz with an octopus.  That’s why I’d rather pay to have my taxes done than wander alone through the bramb

My blog of July 8, 2014 was about the effects of random acts of “niceness.”  It told the story of one writer’s decision make a conscious effort to be kind to a stranger each day.  When she opened her eyes to the opportunities, she discovered people all around her were performi

Academia is busily stirring another tempest in a tea pot as it attempts to assimilate technology into the teaching of humanities.  The new approach is called digital humanities and the first problem is how to define it.  At the moment the term includes everything from transcribing l

Last Friday, the nation celebrated its 238th birthday with the usual fanfare.  However battered our democracy may seem at times, it’s still a work in progress and looks to the future.  Generations upon generations of citizens have carried this political experiment forward, though

I read what seemed a snide comment in the news the other day.  Lec Walesa, former president of Poland, observed that the United States was declining as a world power.  Instead of being incensed, I cheered.  Since World War II, the United States has been defending liberal order in t

Most of my travels on the internet involve research for my writing, my blog in particular.  Women’s rights issues interest  me, so I often find myself reading material about the Middle East.  Knowing about big data as I do, I shouldn’t have been surprised when one day an ad for

By now, the NSA has disabused us of the notion that an individual has a right to personal privacy.  To be honest, most of us already give it away through blogs like mine or the comments we make on social networks.  The Web is so much a part of our lives that we sometimes forget we a

Is it me or does anyone else see irony in the way we humans wring our hands over climate change but do little about it while at the same time, we expend great amounts of energy to preserve our health?  Today there are electronic gadgets that measure every facet of our anatomy, our he