Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an avid walker. I cross Broadway every day, sometimes several times as I go about my errands and appointments. Being a pedestrian crossing Broadway is not a casual event; I make eye contact with drivers to make sure... Continue
Public Citizen
From the smallest animal to the largest, hunger, the first and strongest drive to assert itself, underlies the substance of animal behavior. Sensory functions - smell, sight, touch, hearing and taste - all support the search for food, and their humble origins may well lie... Continue
Truth can be elusive, so much so that the entirety of the scientific method may be seen as a systematic attempt to find it. Our scientific age, roughly 300 years old, was preceded by uncountable eons of magical thinking and mythology, variously employed to explain... Continue
Neither of my parents were observant Jews. Yes, we belonged to a reform temple and would attend services there for the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, but other than that, we were mostly Jews in name only. We ate bagels, cream... Continue
Walking seems such a simple thing. I used to think nothing of jumping up and heading out of the house when I was a boy; following the impulse to move felt seamless, an act so natural as to be thoughtless. My father Norman was a... Continue
The world is turned upside down; global warming, international relations, pandemic disease, and regional politics have all gone nuts. Appreciation of norms, the behavioral and social customs that preserve comity and decorum, is not in decline; it’s collapsed. Trump and his minions are not the... Continue
We may be living in the digital age, but many of us grew up when the world was only analog, which means we possess many generations of family photographs. I’m talking about photographic prints, many of them black and white, filling envelopes and storage boxes... Continue
At 75-million strong, Baby Boomers have had an outsized effect on our nation’s economy, culture of entertainment, technology, fashion industry, environment, real estate, and virtually everything else about contemporary life. In our passage from children to codgers, we’ve been like the bulge in a python... Continue
Anyone who’s raised children knows that of three basic freedoms - to say “no,”, to relocate, to choose friends - the freedom to say “no” is among the earliest to manifest. As an element of basic freedom, animal life has said “no” from its very... Continue
Is the purpose of government to protect the common welfare or protect private property? This question is at the heart of American politics and encapsulates many of the differences between those on the right and those on the left. Conservatives argue that individual liberty is... Continue