Fine wine has always benefited from a goodly bit of snob appeal. The French certainly enjoyed being wine snobs and Americans, never to be outdone, have worked hard and long to catch up. Prestigious wine enjoys a particular cachet, equal parts snobbery, expense, rarity and... Continue

Everybody’s talking “transparency” these days. I used to think that transparent meant nearly invisible, like glass is transparent, but its meaning seems to have morphed into exactly the opposite. So when we talk about transparency in government today, what we mean is making the operation... Continue

What are we to make of our obsession with zombies? If one considers mass media as a window into our collective human consciousness, then the mass-media outbreak of zombies represents the expression of a symbolic neurosis emerging from modern society as whole. Human society in... Continue

Blame Grand Central Station. New York was once ready to tear the Grand Dame down and replace her with a glass-clad skyscraper. I was horrified by the idea, and still am. Penn Station had already suffered the ravages of the wrecking ball, and it seemed... Continue

Communication between people defines us as social beings; all our senses are employed in the act of establishing contact and sharing information with others. Ordinarily, our senses work in concert with each other, creating a synesthetic blend of information from which we continuously convey and... Continue

In a society of over 300 million people efficiencies are needed, and representative democracy is how we choose to provide efficiency in the development and administration of governmental public policy. Other societies are organized differently but all governmental systems, whether democracy, monarchy or autocracy are... Continue

Benjamin Braddock, the part played by Dustin Hoffman in director Mike Nichol’s acclaimed film “The Graduate,” is taken aside by a dinner guest at the graduation party thrown for him by his parents and quietly told the secret to his future success. “Plastics,” the guest... Continue

Surveillance in the digital age is a universal reality at unprecedented scale, reaching into the intimate details of uncountable millions of individual lives. Now politely called “data-mining” to lessen it’s sense of violation, we used to call such activity espionage or spying and its “Peeping... Continue

It’s notable that so much of that which make us uniquely human remains hidden until we die. Metaphysical strands and threads invisibly connect us to each other, things and events in which we had a part, stretching through time and space often unacknowledged and unseen.... Continue