Quarterly Potpourri

Advice to investors. In last week's column "€œDon"€™t Sup With a FUP"€ I offered a golden nugget of life advice to the younger generation: Avoid fucked-up people. Now that we know that Greece is the geographical equivalent of Lindsay Lohan, perhaps I should do another advice column, this one addressed to bankers and investors: Avoid ...


Nothing Is Real

T.S. Eliot's observation that "€œhuman kind cannot bear very much reality"€ is surely up among the half-dozen wisest things ever said about our common nature. There is, of course, individual variation in how much reality we can ...

Two Great Wars

Every nation has, in its collective psyche, a special place for its bloodiest war: a place warmed with intense emotions and turbulent with unresolved"€”probably unresolvable"€”controversies. For Americans that place is occupied by ...

Follow Heart Whatever Desire

Here it comes, the big seven-oh. Next Wednesday to be exact; around 6:45 GMT, to be even more exact. It was quite an entrance, as I recorded in We Are Doomed. I was actually born around breakfast time on a Sunday morning, at a nursing ...

Bill Nye

Nye Lied, I Sighed

Bill Nye the Science Guy gave a commencement speech at Rutgers on Sunday. Reading the speech left me thinking that if this is America's designated Science Guy, I can be the nation's designated swimsuit model. Up to now I have had only ...

George I

300 Years of Prime Ministers

All proper congratulations to David Cameron, elected last week as Prime Minister of Britain on the Conservative Party ticket. I can"€™t say I repose any great hopes that Cameron will actually conserve anything; but then, Britain's not ...

The Case for Natural Stupidity

All of us by now, with the possible exception of some Sentinelese Islanders, are acquainted with the notion of Artifical Intelligence (AI). Most of us have read the news stories about how some alarming proportion of jobs"€”including ...

Thomas Cromwell

Serving the Tiger

Having already confessed to being a reader of middlebrow fiction, I get occasional emails from readers asking for recommendations.  Well, there's no disputing matters of taste, so don"€™t blame me if yours isn"€™t mine, and ...

Camp of the Stupids

The mass drowning of eight or nine hundred"€”nobody knows precisely"€”illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean last Sunday triggered a lot of commentary about these boat people, most of it stupid. Here are some of the grosser ...

Cops and Robbers

What was your first thought on seeing that video clip of the white cop shooting the fleeing black perp? Mine was: "€œWhat fresh lie is this?"€ The point of reference here is the Trayvon Martin case of three years ago, when NBC ...


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