The day after Alex Pretti’s death, I sat down with a cup of coffee beside a woman who was finishing her lunch. When I mentioned my shock over the young man’s killing, she said she’d heard the news on NPR and found the incident too upsetting to discuss.   A book she was reading

Suzy Wiles’ assessment of Donald Trump’s Cabinet in the Winter issue of Vanity Fair may have given many readers a chuckle.  She called it a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.  (“Eye of the Hurricane,” by Chris Whipple, Vanity Fair, Winter, 2

When I was in my 50s, my stockbroker encouraged me to buy shares in a company he claimed would be a game-changer in energy conservation.  I purchased 1000 shares at $11 each. Then, I waited. When the stock dropped to $1, I was ready to give up, but my broker advised me to hold on, so

Democrats danced in the streets last Tuesday.  Special elections painted some red states blue, and California’s redistricting plan succeeded in waving a middle finger at Texas’s efforts at gerrymandering.  Yet danger to our democracy persists. Oligarchs, aided by low taxes and t

I met Noam Chomsky in graduate school.  I say “met” metaphorically.  His work was required reading for my degree.  He had an idea that language was natural to the human brain, then went about proving it with linguistics–an almost mathematical formulation of how languages

Sitting down to lunch with my broker, his conversation turned to an old worry. “The national debt keeps growing.  Congress has to reign it in.” “What’s your solution?” I asked before taking a sip of coffee. “Should children of low-income families go without lunch?  Shoul

Knowledge is power said Elizabethan Francis Bacon. The father of empiricism, or modern science, put his faith in the observable rather than the spiritual. Studying nature was enough to glorify God, he said. Since then, mankind has amassed a store of information in subjects far ranging

While Russia persists in its ambitions for world dominance, I wonder if Putin notices technology is inventing other realities. First, there was the worldwide net. Next came virtual reality. Now there is the metaverse.   According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, the metaverse

My love-hate relationship with technology continues.  Recently, I rejoiced over an announcement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has invented some fascinating methods to conquer lethal bacteria.  Hurrah! New frontiers!  New ways to arrest illnesses without debilitating chemical tr

Last week, I wrote a blog capped by a cartoon which amused my web manager.  (Click)  It exposed the gobbledygook terms that accrue to Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Apparently, the alphabet soup expresses different purposes.  Or, as a tweet from a recent article revealed, “It’