This past winter I read the book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond’s explanation for why western culture has created such an excess of wealth compared to other cultures--the short,…

I’m a sucker for articles promising to tell you the secret to happiness and satisfaction. Naturally I fell for a recent article in The Atlantic Online titled How to Want…

I had an unusual college education, four years of classics, only primary texts, heavy on philosophy, no textbooks, no elective classes–The St John’s College Great Books program.  There are a…

Many years ago, before reality sufficiently overcame sentimentality, before I realized that Town Meeting was a farcical play in which half the cast follows stage directions from a bygone era…

If you want to inflict the unforgettable on your memory then you can watch a grizzly bear excavating the den of a black bear and hauling off a screaming cub…

Wealth comes from work. A person or a country can get wealthy by stealing wealth from someone else, but the original source of the stolen wealth is still work.  Whether…

The most underappreciated phrase in The Declaration of Independence is not the hopeful observation about equality and pursuit of happiness but instead occurs a few lines later and is much…

I propose that since the turn of the milenia technology has created a new law of human relations and it is this: Over time, in a technologically advanced country, the…

I try to limit my superstitions to knocking on wood and not making predictions about the future. Having winnowed my overt irrational belief system to these two pillars, I cling…

The bear was my first flood lesson.  A couple of weeks before the flood, just at dusk,  I went out to hang some towels on the clothesline. I mistook rustling…

I've become obsessed with Paul Cooper's Fall of Civilizations podcast, but my wife is completely over hearing me describe fragments from this series. “I don’t need to hear it because…

Any day of the week I can tune in to mainstream media and listen to an elite pundit, liberal or conservative depending on my mood,  whining and opining about the…

In 1998, as part of a corporate downsizing, my father chose early retirement. He took his money in a lump sum and invested it in the stock market himself. His…

I try to limit my superstitions to knocking on wood and not making predictions about the future. Having winnowed my overt irrational belief system to these two pillars, I cling…

I was daydreaming at a red light in East Montpelier. When the light  finally turned green, the dump truck in front of me barked, emitted a cloud of black smoke…

Twenty years of death, mangled bodies, tormented minds and trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and it ends with people so desperate to leave the place that they are falling…

Sonnet 29 William Shakespeare When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon…

Inequality is where capitalism and racism converge. This is more word equation than essay. Rather than  advance an argument, I’m just going to state some uncontroversial (I think) facts which…

Like a lot of Americans, I drive around wondering what it would take to feel as though we were all in this together, one country instead of red against blue,…

In 1994 my brother and I took a two month road trip from Vermont to Los Angeles.  Back then we called home on a pay phone, I made my journal…