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

  Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” lists the attributes of a rational human being. Paramount is to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…  That’s a tall order these days.  Robert Reich, famed economist and liberal commentator, lost his head recently. Furious

Donald Trump’s presidency taught us the strength of our institutions depends upon our goodwill.  They work because we want them to.   If we doubted the integrity of the ballot box and our judicial system, for example, we’d condemn ourselves to second-guessing every outcome.  I

Being someone who meditates for enlightenment, I decided to bend my thoughts to the state of our democracy. My reason for doing so was this statement: the public has more confidence in the military than any other national institution. (“Crisis of Command,” by Risa Brooks et al, Fo

Each evening when I turn off my bedside lamp, I pause to consider the cataclysmic shifts that will occur while I sleep. Somewhere in the universe, a planet may drop into a black hole or a pair of distant stars collide. From the sea, crabs might scramble toward the shore to lay their e

Sex is good. Sex is fun.  But sex isn’t power.  Some women don’t grasp that fact.  Crammed into padded bras that make chin rests of their breasts, these gals ought to know when a man faces so much cleavage, he can’t hear a word they say.    The young female who wore a see-

“We make lists because we don’t want to die.” So says, Umberto Eco, medievalist, philosopher, and author of Foucault’s Pendulum. With lists, we attempt to manage time, knowing time is a nonrenewable resource.  A list fixes a task to memory and gives us the psychological satis

One evening this week, I listened to an expert’s advice on how to change the minds of unvaccinated people. He was selling an old technique called Active Listening. In this case, an individual repeats an antivaxer’s objections, so the person will be satisfied those objections have

Joe Biden, 46th President of the United States is a  mild-mannered man who shares Mr. Rogers’ temperament more than most in politics. But he’s not withheld criticism of those who refuse to wear masks in public places during the pandemic. He accused these offenders of  Neandertha

The young woman was standing on the curb a short distance from the grocery store, her shopping cart overflowing with purchases. She was muttering to the air in angry tones, so I intended to skirt around her, presuming she was one of the mentally ill who inhabits our streets. Something