Category: politics
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Things change!
…because it’s the only world we get, and because we inherit it, it seems permanent, and dependable.
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I grieve for my beloved Hong Kong
It has bad air. I was still a smoker when I worked there, and I joked it was protective. It’s impossibly expensive, though plenty of people live there cheaply. It’s a culture clash, crash, and fusion — Chinese and Anglo, old and new, rich and poor, metropolitan and tropical, high-pressure and laid-back. It’s fast, so…
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Sticking to my knitting (opinions)
As Facebook gently reminded me — my professional media have been stale. It was less a writer’s block than a blind alley. Perhaps others will find my thinking instructive. Like everybody, I have opinions about the world, and in these contentious times, it’s very tempting to share them. Everyone else is, and I talk prettier than…
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A Republican Hamlet
Blame the English teachers at those fine expensive schools, trying desperately to engage their bored charges with a play about reckless youth. If only the chattering classes had been taught how to read Hamlet properly, they might have better understood this year’s presidential primaries. Let’s do a Republican Hamlet. Best thing is, you don’t have…
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The power of story (2016 Iowa Caucus)
I have wagered with my wife that the 2016 US major-party presidential nominees will be Trump and Clinton. I don’t regret my choices after the Iowa Caucus. I understand the power of story. On the Democratic side, one story seems better — a dark horse, vastly more leftist than anything we’ve seen in decades, going from…
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Robots vs. androids in fiction (go robots!)
Among the characters in my new novel is a collective of former package-delivery drones that, after a war, evolved themselves into a taxi service for their damaged city. From the earliest drafts, I saw them as small flying saucers, with only a central trunk/harness to carry goods or a seated cross-legged person. It took a little…
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The STEM and the Flower (Education)
Thanks to Fareed Zakaria for his recent column calling out the recent obsession with STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I urge its wide readership. The issue is not STEM, of course, but obsession — and it’s not really obsession, in the end, but the lazy desire for a panacea. Wouldn’t it be great…
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Revolutionary atheists vs Stockholm syndrome (John Gray)
Esteemed cosmologist, and my old friend, Andrew Jaffe just posted a quick retort on his blog to a long essay by philosopher John Gray. Gray has an objection to the strident challenging tone of modern atheist thought-leaders like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. I am not the scientist Andrew Jaffe is, and I was hopeful that…
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Fighting nonsense and spin, climate-change edition
You are driving, and almost out of gas, but you have two passengers who both need a ride. One fell at a construction site and has a steel bar through her chest. The other needs to quit smoking or she will develop emphysema in thirty years. With your limited resources, is it better to go…
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Optimism and Zombies
Almost fifty years ago, Stewart Brand wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog that we were as gods and that we might as well get good at it. At roughly the same time, George Romero made Night of the Living Dead. Guess which one inspires our culture today? Fifty years from now, the zombie might have the quaintness of…