The week ends with news of further firings from the inner circle of palace courtiers. The Secretary of State was fired several days ago. The Deputy FBI Director Anthony McCabe was fired last night, by a twitter post. By way of contrast I offer these words of Wendell Berry, taken from the last essay,…
Received an email from a friend yesterday informing me of his enthusiasm for Antonio Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things. The work is about the importance of story telling. To say that story telling is important is to greatly underestimate the matter. I do not think it is possible to understand how our…
I am reading a book by Omar El Akkad. He is a journalist. He was born in Cairo Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar. He has filed dispatches from the NATO led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement…
Soon the light will begin to fade. I’d rather have my say in the morning before the usual responsibilities, the newscasts on NPR, etc. clutter my mind. I prefer a clean sheet to draw my word-pictures for the day. Today was different. It was necessary to be in traffic on I94 at rush hour,…
This is the ruinous contradiction underlying present-day American “conservatism.” For the present economy to thrive or even survive, it is necessary for the great majority of the people to have exorbitant or inordinate wants, to expect to get what they want, and to feel that they have a “right” to get it. But to…
Some songs seem immortal. This one happened on the radio over the weekend. I am still thinking about it. Standing In The Shadows of Love by the Four Tops was one of Motown’s greatest hits. There is a driving, surging passion in the tune that mimics the tide of life that is reminiscent of…
In all of this back and forth about Truth this and Truth that we are missing a crucial point and that is: Truth is not a single thing 1. Personal Truth – Humans desperately want to believe that the world is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). The keyboard I’m typing…
Yesterday I was a guest for a tenth birthday celebration. The party was a glorious event. The family affair was held in honor of Myles’s tenth birthday. Josh and Cassie were host to a house full of family and close friends. The feasting, story telling, the presents, the cake, everything was perfect to say…
In his essay on “How to Raise a Boy” Michael Kimmel offers these answers to the question: “What does it mean to be a good man?” This list of attributes were offered by several thousand young men around the world to Kimmel’s question. Integrity Honor Being Responsible Being a good provider, protector Doing the…
What? Sounds like a obscure cult? Do Panpsychists have a holy text? Could the condition be a recently diagnosed disease, for which a new wonder drug is being pitched on TV? I doubt you’d think any of those things. You’d be sensitive to the components of the word, pan and psyche. Likely you’d know…
