A village is the antithesis of a civilized society. Why did the world urbanize? Because people wanted to leave the village environment in which everybody knew everybody else’s business. But as early as the 1970’s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that, thanks to modern mass media, we would all soon live in a global village. He was […]

Forget the romantic drug smuggling movies, filled with sophisticated villains driving Maseratis, swaggering down the Vegas strip with a supermodel on each arm, smoking Cuban cigars, sucking a fortune in white powder up their aquiline noses, dancing the night away with other sophisticates in posh nighteries, all with the proceeds from tunneling under the border with […]

Ah, the good old days! Beaver coats, pennants, bootleg hootch down at Mory’s, and the joyous singing of “Boola Boola” as the Yale football team crushed the pantywaists of Fair Harvard. Or got crushed. Who cared? Well, it’s a century later, but the old fight song still has an eerie resonance. However, that resonance only […]

“Dracula” was published in 1897 by Bram Stoker, whose day job was stage manager for the D’Oyly-Carte Opera Company, producers of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. I suppose that endless days of light-hearted drollery drove him around the bend. But “Dracula” really rehabilitated the vampire. Up until that time, the vampire was viewed essentially […]

That’s Latin for “Who guards the guardians themselves, ” a quaint Roman rhetorical question. In addition to its disquieting portent, it leads on to a series of equally disturbing questions, viz.: “Who guards the guardians who guard the guardians?” And “Who guards the guardians who guard the guardians who guard the guardians?” etc., ad nauseum, […]