Posts Tagged ‘Mark Twain’
POLICE STATE USA
A favorite novel begins with a terrified protagonist: “The footsteps—thick-sole, steel-toe heavy, no pretense at stealth—approached our floor from the wrong direction. On a Monday morning, most people left their apartments for work, shlepped their still-sleepy way down the stairs as Indira had earlier. The stomping that terrified me came up from the lobby. I…
Read MoreTWAIN, STALIN AND COVID
Surprise! The field of statistics links Mark Twain with Josef Stalin—and the two of them with the COVID-19 pandemic. “There are three kinds of lies…” Twain wrote, “…lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Stalin supposedly said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” Both statements apply to some Americans’ response to COVID-19’s impact…
Read MoreUNCERTAINTY
Benjamin Franklin wrote, “…nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Mark Twain repeated that. But the real author was Englishman Christopher Bullock in 1716. Recent decades have supported Bullock and Franklin (and Twain) with the dictum that the only certainty is change. Look around. The President of the United States fills…
Read MoreLOUISIANA
Most Californians think about Louisiana—New Orleans aside—as God, guns and gumbo. Carolyn and I spent Thanksgiving week in Baton Rouge with our son Seth, a graduate student at Louisiana State. The visit demonstrated that there’s more. Our hotel room overlooked the Mississippi River. We were thrilled. Here flows one of the hearts of America—a highway…
Read MoreLET THE BOOK BURNING BEGIN
Political correctness recently broke out in Brisbane, Australia. Officials at a writers festival were so upset with novelist and keynote Lionel Shriver (The Mandibles), “they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks,” according to the New York Times. What horrific things did she say? “Ms. Shriver criticized as runaway political correctness…
Read MoreBILLIONS AND BILLIONS
Those of us who saw the late Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan on TV remember the glee with which he emphasized that the universe contains stars numbering “billions and billions.” If only a small percentage host habitable planets like Earth, Sagan proclaimed, life must exist elsewhere. Now, more refined numbers are coming in. In Tuesday’s San…
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