In his New York Times column for March 6, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, whom I have always admired, talks about the “15-minute city,” a…
“Teach us to care and not to care,” says T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday. Let the reader of the following newsletter beware: it is written by someone who…
In an article in Harvard Business Review in 2017, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that there is a “loneliness epidemic.” Whether or not…

February 2023

Reviews of James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water are sometimes critical of its rather schematic plot and characterization, and also its rather bland…
This newsletter continues a meditation upon memory—though a specific kind of memory: general and cultural rather than personal, extraverted and…
As I have admitted in previous newsletters, I have a bad memory, which limits me in any number of ways, both practically and intellectually. I am not…
I have always been struck by a repeated assertion of one of my heroes, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, about those people he called…
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January 2023

Newsletter writers’ anxiety syndrome has two variations. One is, “Will I run out of things to write about?” The other is, “Am I beginning to repeat…
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Western literature begins with anger. The first word of Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek is the word for rage: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of…
A great deal of excitement has been stirred up by the release in November of a new form of artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to being an…
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I have always loved the visual arts because of their stillness. A painting or a sculpture does not move. It is at rest. Even if it depicts the most…

December 2022

Across the map of the world, waves of desperate humanity are sweeping, their homes lost or too dangerous to stay in, and everywhere, in their heartless…