The young woman seated opposite me at the restaurant was an orphan. A few months earlier, her mother had died of cancer. Her father had departed this earth years earlier after a fall from a ladder. Both parents I’d known since college, a bookish pair who remained in the same four-st

During this pandemic, I keep reflecting on the opening lines of Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times and the worst of times.  The words suggest that fate has a fickle side.  For example, thieves might be happy that wearing a mask in public is acceptable.

In a recent opinion piece, Clive Thompson begins with the question, “What do you do when you discover you are wrong?” (“Retraction Heroes,” by Clive Thompson, Wired, Feb, 2018, pg. 034.)  He goes on to extol the merits of an evolutionary biologist, Daniel Bolnick, who pub

A number of things make me happy though not all of them are good for me. Unlimited access to hot fudge sundaes would be one of these. So would lying on a sunny beach for hours, giving no thought to skin cancer. The one drawback of these delights is that they pertain only to me. But th