In Los Angeles Magazine last night, a ghoulish yet compelling story held my rapt attention. It was about what happens to you when you die. With a pre-amble that waxed philosophic on the inevitability of death despite all of our preoccupations with trying to stay healthy and put off the […]

I”m reading a book called Socialist Dreams and Beauty Queens: A Couchsurfer’s Memoir of Venezuela by a young English writer named Jamie Maslin. The facts he presents by visiting so many people there have completely changed my opinion of a man who I once thought of as a force for […]

In normal human reproduction, there is a natural tendency to have more boys than girls…the ratio is about 104 to 100. But a new book by Mara Hvistendahl has come out about how much this has changed over the past fifty years and the dramatic repercussions that changing this ratio […]

Sitting around a dinner table with a group of close friends, wine flowing freely, someone throws out that Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, must be intending to use WMDs. It’s 2003, and the US is just about to launch the Shock and Awe campaign of missiles based on intelligence that proved […]

I”m riding a Greyhound bus heading north out of New York City. I must give the bus line and Peter Pan a little credit, since I think bus travel has markedly improved over the past few years. I wrote in this space about Megabus, so I’m giving the other more […]

A column by Richard Clarke in the WSJ posed a challenging question: What would the US do if the Chinese government planted explosives along our electricity grid? Most of us would be alarmed, and we would expect that a military response would be the next step. Wouldn’t we? Today, the […]

Tomorrow I’ll join photographer and fellow GoNOMAD staffer Paul Shoul and take an early train into New York City. We will get there early enough to scout out our Brooklyn digs for the night and then proceed to a luncheon hosted by Maine and New Brunswick Tourism in Manhattan. The […]