America fawns absurdly over singers and actors and expects under-educated athletes to be our role models. National and international news in my local newspaper, the Santa Rosa, CA, Press Democrat (owned by The New York Times), almost always comprises fewer column inches than the sports section.
The Stupidification of America continues unabated.
Irving R. Levine died Friday, [...]
February 11, 2009 – 11:13 am
Born 200 years ago, February 12, 1809: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in the bios, and Abraham Lincoln, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in society.
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But perhaps these two Great Men were not born on the same day. Darwin’s birth was [...]
February 4, 2009 – 9:49 am
wild turkey tracks
This short piece, from the Opinion page of The New York Times (2/2/09), is unpretentious, evocative writing. Read it aloud…slowly.
Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke [...]
When Richard Feynman came back to Ojai’s Summer Science Program for a second, unscheduled visit, his topic was what he called “smallness.” Today that field, in which he was a visionary, is called Nanotechnology.
Having been mesmerized by Feynman’s brilliance and wit during his talk on Relativity a couple of weeks earlier, we 36 science/math nerds [...]
Richard Feynman at Summer Science Program
In 1960, I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, my feet thrust out, listening to Caltech’s Richard Feynman explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Einstein, dead for only five years, was an icon and a Nobel Laureate. I was too young and unread then to know [...]
February 25, 2008 – 8:24 am
My mother died ten years ago this week, and I am brought to think of the vanishing point, that not-so-distant past beyond which none of us can know the fathers and mothers who brought us here.
My parents were flesh to me, as were both grandmothers. I never knew either grandfather, but they are romance and [...]
February 20, 2008 – 10:17 am
What actually happens is not always in the history books.
I grew up in California in the 50’s, graduating from high school in 1961, only 16 years after World War II ended. So how was it possible that in all my classes there was not one mention of the internment of Americans of Japanese [...]
February 18, 2008 – 5:50 am
Almost two months had passed by my Harvard freshman door. It was 1961, early November, and the air was crisp and blue-gray. I had moved into Pennypacker Hall from a smallish farm town 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the smartest of 900 kids graduating from a large public high school that had [...]
February 16, 2008 – 5:47 am
At Little Big Horn National Monument, a low, iron railing surrounds the modest, marble slabs that mark where each white man fell. The fenced rectangle is smaller than my back yard. Custer’s Last Stand…an immense celebration of an ignominious outrage. The day is overcast, cold, and wet. Forty-eight degrees feels colder in [...]
February 11, 2008 – 11:30 am
This morning, rising with formless, benignant wonderings about my future and vague remembrances of my long-ago youth, I surprised myself with an abrupt focus on Prof. Joshua Whatmough (”WHAT-moe”).
I googled and found a perfect description of his terrifying and exhilarating classroom (in 1947) put up on a webpage by one of Whatmough’s former students, William [...]
