Two feet of snow. Before even one inch fell, our brave media christened this latest snowfall “The Blizzard of 2013.” In the 1800’s, people had the decency to wait until 1889 to christen the March 1888 snowstorm “The Blizzard of ’88.” But now, we need a dramatic label, preferably conjuring up images of hardy pioneers […]

In 1909, E.M. Forster, author of “A Passage to India” and other joyful classics, wrote a novella entitled “The Machine Stops.” He pictured a world in which face to face communication had died out. People lived underground, and sat at their desks all day communicating with a circle of friends through terminals. HUH? WHAT? Did […]

Originally, civilizations kept the fun part and the reproductive part of sex intimately entwined, so to speak. You could have wives and concubines, but they were all supposed to produce progeny. Man’s ingenuity (excuse me, person’s ingenuity) then invented the solely recreational part-time concubine, or hooker. (By the way, the origin of the term dates to […]

In his classic work Leviathan, which invented the concept of the social contract as underlying civilization,  Hobbes declares that “Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short.” This is still the situation in primitive uncivilized backwaters, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, and Detroit. But in general, we have created civilizations that enable most […]

As the Roman Empire sank into the mire, leaving behind magnificent ruins and a landscape filled with peasants who would one day lift themslves up from degradation to create pizza, their theater went to hell. The diction remained classy, but the staging began to include amputations and actual murders on stage. Which brings me to […]