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 fucked-up countries. If I do so, I think I"€™ll avoid the acronym. "€œFUP"€ is just about all right for wide circulation, but "€œFUC"€? Eh... How many EU bureaucrats does it take...? There's an old Levantine proverb about the relative ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Quarterly Potpourri

Virtue totalitarianism. For devout Christian bakers, florists, and photographers throughout the U.S.A., the message going out from the news recently has been the one Anouk Aimee ...

A Civilization Steeped in Dishonesty

[Scene:  A bakery store somewhere in the U.S.A.] Customer:  "€œGood morning!"€ Store clerk:  "€œHello.  How may I help you?"€ Customer:  ...

The Nerdcom

What things make us laugh?  In all times and places the top draws have been sex, class, and race.  The precise way these major themes tickle our funnybones varies with ...

Oscar Wilde

Quote, Unquote

Reading Steven Goldberg's Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences the other day, I got to his 1998 essay on the Clinton scandals. Steve starts off with an Oscar Wilde quote: I ...


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