I’ve been reading a lot about guns and gun ownership lately.  Since we have just had two major mass shootings 10 days apart—one in a supermarket, one in a school–this is not surprising. And then we had about 10 more. The media sees guns and gun ownership as a topic of compelling interest right now. That said, I was surprised that, according to a Pew Research Poll, only 30% of Americans own a gun.  I thought it was more. Juxtapose that fact with the statistic that there are over 300 million guns in private hands, and that means some gun owners … Read More

It’s happened again.  Another mass shooting by a teenager with a gun in Buffalo, NY, this time livestreamed on social media by the shooter as it happened. He had a manifesto, as they often do—180 pages written, apparently, over months and posted to his private social media site.  We hear the hackneyed responses–“thoughts and prayers,” “this violence must stop,” “we must get these guns off the street.” These gestures are limp, without real effect. They go nowhere. Nothing will happen.  The funerals will go forward.  Lawsuits will eventually be filed. Memories of lives lost will torment the families of the victims forever. Elsewhere life … Read More

I read recently in The Week about a new scientific breakthrough where scientists “made the skin cells of a 53-year-old woman look and behave like those of a 23-year-old.”  According to the article, this process “could be used to shave decades off organ cells.”  Another technology to lengthen lifespan, along with Silicon valley pipedreams of bionic brains and cryonic freezing.  Recently I read about one space entrepreneur’s continued fascination with going to Mars.  He said recently that he wants to die on Mars.

I wonder if any of these tech geniuses have really thought about what it would mean to human society if we … Read More

I’ve been reading a lot about guns and gun ownership lately.  Since we have just had two major mass shootings 10 days apart—one in a supermarket, one in a school–this is not surprising. The media sees guns and gun ownership as a topic of compelling interest right now. That said, I was surprised that, according to a Pew Research Poll, only 30% of Americans own a gun.  I thought it was more. Juxtapose that fact with the statistic that there are over 300 million guns in private hands, and that means some gun owners must own lots of guns.  And ammo too.  A … Read More

I just read a news story that drug overdose deaths nationally reached a new high in 2021 of 107,000, up 15% from 2020—and 2020 was up 30% from 2019.  It was not a “major” news story, it was overshadowed by rising gas prices, Ukraine news, the Supreme Court and political primary battles.  It seems to me, in other words, that we—or at least the news media—are becoming numb to this story.  When drug overdoses first became a crisis, it was all over the news.  Politicans and opinion makers wrung their hands; what is happening to our country? What is causing this? Now, it seems, … Read More

My birth mother was destined for great things.  Born into a first-generation immigrant Greek-American family in New Jersey, she was the first girl in her community to graduate from high school, and then the first woman to graduate from college.  She was brilliant and idealistic, and like many young people coming of age in the 1940s, she believed in the possibility of positive social change through government and the innovations of Roosevelt’s New Deal.  I don’t know the details or even for sure if it is true, but I was told by family members that my mother served as an intern in the … Read More

I don’t know exactly what I mean when I say the world is coming unglued. But I feel it. It’s a premonition, a tremor in the fabric of the reality that until recently I thought was more reliable and solid.  I also have a better sense of what it means for the world to be “glued”—a sense that everything coheres and sticks together.  The world is “glued” when what I experience and what other people experience is pretty much the same world.  But that’s not true anymore.  More and more people are curating their own reality, their own sense of what is true and … Read More

If you google “time horizon,” you will get various articles about financial time horizon—in other words, whether are you are short-term or long-term investor.  That’s not what I mean; I’m talking about your mental time horizon—how far ahead you are thinking and planning in your life.  This kind of time horizon changes with how young or old you are, whether you are anxious or calm, whether your life is in a stable plateau or in a time of rapid change.  Outside events can change the time horizon for everyone.  For example, Covid, particularly in its early months, contracted everyone’s time horizon to a few … Read More

Our world is awash in noise, and I don’t mean just traffic sounds and jackhammers.  I also mean the digital world of social media, pop-up ads, spam, phishing, unwanted phone calls and texts, flashing billboards, YouTube pitches, TikTok glitz—the list goes on.  I am of the last generation that grew up without computers.  Soon there will be no-one left who remembers such a world, and before long no-one will remember a world without smartphones either. Children and teenagers, whose brains are still developing, might be neurologically damaged by all this digital stimulation—it is too soon for the long-term research to know for sure. … Read More

I have just finished reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  This was a best-selling sensation when it came out a couple of years ago, and I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner.  It is quite a powerful presentation of race in America as an instance of the wider and deeper phenomenon of caste, which Wilkerson analyzes in India and Nazi Germany for comparison.  If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly urge you to do so.  It will transform and deepen your understanding of racism and the long history of slavery in America, and illuminate the ways that caste, even more than race, is central … Read More