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

The older I get, the more I fall behind the modern culture.  For example, while taping a Just Read It segment on Colm Toibin’s fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann, I was stunned to learn that one of my young guests knew little about one of the twentieth century’s greatest

The other day I sat down to talk with a fellow resident at my retirement center.  She was eating fish tacos, a messy lunch which I knew would require both hands as well as her mouth.  An excellent time to air my views on Donald Trump, I thought.  I don’t recall what outrage the p

She was annoyed with me, the woman on Facebook.  I’d taken a position with which she disagreed.  We exchanged one or two comments.  Then I let the matter drop.  We were jousting over opinions, after all. Stellar orbits remained intact.  Tides would continue to roll in from the

While I’ve been thrashing around for a transgender pronoun, it appears the transgenders have solved the problem.  The preferred word is they. (Brain Nonbinary,” by Virginia Heffernan, Wired, March 2019, pgs. 11-13.)  Writer Virginia Heffernan posits they is appropriate because i

Six years ago, I wrote that Moby Dick was being translated into emoji. (Click)  I hardly knew what emojis* were at the time.  Since then, Facebook emojis have become familiar, but I’ve never given much thought to how they came into being or how there could be enough to translate a

My father taught me the difference between truth and a lie when I was five.  The story begins with a teddy bear, a tiny, plastic ornament that hung at the end of my toothbrush. I loved to watch it in the bathroom mirror, bouncing up and down as I cleaned my teeth.  One day, the tedd

An article by Virginia Heffernan in Yahoo. News caught my attention the other day: “Lady Firsters: Why the new sex segregation is great for women.” (9/20/12) The essay struck me as the joyful crowing of an empowered young woman and a part of me was happy, being a war horse of the