aph·o·rism [ˈafəˌrizəm] NOUN a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples: “The child is father to the man.” (William Wadsworth) “Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.…
Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun…
“If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.” Apparently de Tocqueville was a more perceptive man in 1835, when America was still a new democracy, than many men are…
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murder’s itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” But we must also remember: this was written in a letter from Adams to John Taylor, 17 December 1814. America had not yet established itself to the Western end of the continent,…
Having written a number of novels involving characters with “dark personalities”, I found this article recently published in BigThink.com worth sharing. The sad reality is that people with high D-factor scores do not live in isolation. The damage they do to the people who interact with them reverberates widely and deeply. They can cause a…
Nearly two years out from the 2020 Presidential elections, the questions of the most appropriate way for U.S. voters to count and tally their Presidential votes is again coming to the forefront. Below, I’ve reprinted an article published on September 1, 2017 on procon.org website on this subject. DLL The debate over the continued…
These words spoken by Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, way back in 1999, open an article by Sue Halpern in the new issue of the New York Review of Books, in which she reviews four new books on privacy. The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America by Sarah…
Teacher’s pay? As Professionals or Babysitters? A teacher recently sent me a text message with a picture of a handwritten sign addressing this issue at a gathering of teachers in another state. Here’s a slightly fuzzy recreation of the sign. The message very cleverly gets across the idea of how little the public and lawmakers…