• O Tempora, O Mores - The current situation in the US is the stuff of bad dreams – according to polls and pundits, the country is likely at the end of its run as a liberal democracy/republic and headed toward a new destiny under an imperial president with fascist ambitions – all neatly spelled out in Project 2025. This isn’t… Continue Reading
• The Road to Fascism - Donald Trump and Project 2025 present the United States with the real possibility of going from a representative, democratic, republican form of government to an autocratic, fascistic form of government. For the record, let us first look at some historical Western European models of the passage from democracy to autocracy to see if there is… Continue Reading
• War in the Holy Land II – World War I - This is a short but dense post based on a memorandum, a speech before parliament, a declaration, a correspondence, entries from a diary, two agreements, a protocol, a revolt, a world war, two armistices, two peace conferences, two mandates, a short war and an interim report. It recounts the intrigues and deal making that led… Continue Reading
• War in the Holy Land - This is the first in a short series of posts on the run-up to the current tragic situation in the Holy Land. This first post deals with the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire.    The Last Caliphate From the 7th Century BC up to modern times, the history of the Holy Land has… Continue Reading
• AI Agonistes -  Apocalypses Now III AI Agonistes The apocalyptic threats associated with AI development are much in the news these days. The field itself is divided into accelerationists who want to move forward as quickly as possible and the effective altruists  (aka decelerationists aka decels aka doomers) who also want to move forward but who are wary… Continue Reading
• Apocalypses Now II - Climate Change is one threatening apocalypse. Here is another. Artificial Intelligence Everywhere you turn these days, Artificial Intelligence pops up. Indeed the press has been all over it. Thus for its Sept. 7 edition, Time Magazine, in the tradition of its Person of the Year, published a cover featuring the “Time 100 AI,” billed as… Continue Reading
• Apocalypses Now - The words apocalypse and apocalyptic are everywhere these days. And for good reason – the world we have known seems to be coming to an end. Truly several major threats are all converging like Biblical plagues at this point in time. They include climate change, artificial intelligence, the end of Christianity as we have known… Continue Reading
• Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson III - For years, the mantra of Brooklyn Dodger fans was “Wait till next year” as season after season went by without a World Series championship. And 1952 was not to be that “next year,” alas; worse, it was made all the harder to bear as "dem Bums" reached the seventh game of a hard-fought World Series… Continue Reading
• Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson II - The Dodgers met the awesome New York Yankees in the 1947 World Series, the first fall classic ever with a Black ball player and the first to be televised - people didn’t have TVs at home yet and the bars of Brooklyn were packed as resourceful publicans showed the game on early Motorola and RCA… Continue Reading
• Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson -   Brooklyn NY was the epicenter of the US war effort of the 1940s: the battleship Missouri was built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the great bulk of the troops who sailed to Europe passed through the Brooklyn Army Terminal in order to board ships waiting at the Brooklyn docks, the best deep water piers… Continue Reading
• A Look Ahead - Back in April 2020, this writer gave the last talk at the Harvard Club, Cape Cod chapter, before the shut-down for Covid. The title was Symbiosis of Mankind and Technology and the tagline was "Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?" The talk had a gloomy side… Continue Reading
• Dollar Diplomacy - In the post WWII period, the power of the US Dollar was put to good use with the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe and the Dollar underwrote an amazing world wide economic integration that has brought material prosperity to many. Analysts like Harvard professor Stephen Pinker argue that there has been a Pax Americana… Continue Reading
• Money Talks - One of the marvels of human reason is the ability to abstract, to see immaterial properties of things, properties that really only exist in our imaginations, and then to use these abstractions to help us navigate our world. An example is the notion of number: if it is a question of 5 cars or of… Continue Reading
• Obstare Decisis - In the US, hostility towards Roman Catholics goes back to the Nativist “Know Nothing” movement of the 19th Century, to “No Irish Need Apply” signs and to Democrat Al Smith’s humiliating defeat in the 1928 presidential election; this hostility even continued into the post WWII period with, for example, warnings of a Catholic plot to take… Continue Reading
• A Logician’s Tale - The Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) is a professional organization of researchers in Mathematical Logic, a field that also includes people from Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy as well as Mathematics itself. When it is not a plague year, the ASL holds an annual meeting in North America and another one in Europe.  This April… Continue Reading
• 1052 And All That - It was in the Lord’s Year MLII that the Great Schism took place that separated Western Christianity from Orthodox Christianity and created a fault line in Europe that is dangerous to this day, particularly for the Slavic peoples of Europe. There had been conflicts both theological and political before between the Pope in Rome and… Continue Reading
• Legitimate Political Discourse - The mob who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was composed of a menagerie of anti-government groups with names like QAnon, The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, spurred on by a Donald Trump pep talk. Reaction by law enforcement has been slow. TIME Magazine reported on the situation as of Jan 6,… Continue Reading
• Femmes Fatales of Yesteryear, Part II - For his classic poem The Ballad of Women of Times Gone By, François Villon rhapsodizes over the snows of yesteryear and the femmes fatales of yesteryear; naturally, he selects his heroines most carefully. In the first stanza, he singles out two renowned courtesans of the ancient world. There is Thais who followed her lover, one… Continue Reading
• Femmes Fatales of Yesteryear - François Villon is the 15th Century French poet who is most famous in the English speaking world today for the plaintive line     Where are the snows of yesteryear?   (Où sont les neiges d’antan?) which serves as a refrain in his poem Ballade des Femmes du Temps Jadis. The translation of “antan” as “yesteryear”… Continue Reading
• An American Back in Paris - Jet lagged beyond belief, we arrived at our daughter’s new place in the 16th arrondissement at 7 am where we exchanged hugs, then listened to instructions on how things work in the apartment until she ran off to the Ivory Coast for a week to work on an industrial insurance claim at a sugar plantation… Continue Reading
• Christian Anti-Semitism III - Fast forward to 19th Century in Europe where pseudo-scientific theories of race emerged. The term “Aryan” comes from a Sanskrit word for “noble” and it was originally used to denote the early speakers of Indo-European languages. The word was co-opted most notoriously by a French aristocrat, diplomat and writer: in his Essay on the Inequalities… Continue Reading
• Christian Anti-Semitism II - In the Roman Empire there were two strains of anti-Jewish writings, those of the Christians and those of the secular Greco-Roman intellectuals. If one considers that the Jews made up 5-10% of the population of the Empire, mostly concentrated in cities (Alexandria, Cyrene, Antioch, Rome, …), the secular literature is not directed against a tiny… Continue Reading
• Christian Anti-Semitism I - In his 2013 book on anti-Semitism, The Devil that Never Dies, Daniel Goldhagen starts the list of calumnies against Jews with: "Jews have killed God’s son. All Jews, and their descendants for all time, . . . are guilty." Indeed, this accusation has been a deadly trigger for anti-Semitism in the Western world for nearly… Continue Reading
• Capitalism to the Rescue - The New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein recently interviewed Noam Chomsky discussing a range of topics including the climate crisis. It has been capitalism with its industrial revolutions and lust for economic growth that are at the root of the problem and Chomsky addressed the question of whether the climate crisis could be handled successfully… Continue Reading
• Biden and the Court - On April 9th, 2021, President Joseph Biden ordered that a commission be established to study the need for structural reform of the United States Supreme Court, in particular with respect to the actual number of justices on the Court, with respect to term limits and with respect to the Court’s unchecked ability to declare acts… Continue Reading
• Power in the US VII: The End of History - Early on in the George H.W. Bush presidency, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; triumphalism was in the air: liberal democracy and capitalism had won. Writing in 1989 in the journal The National Interest, historian Francis Fukuyama penned an article “The End of History,” in which… Continue Reading
• Power in the US VI: Multiplying the Divisions - In carrying out its reconstruction of the American Way of Life, the Reagan administration was remarkably thorough. Thus the administration’s zeal for deregulation led in the early 1980s to the dismantling of the Federal Home Loan Act of 1932 and the unleashing of Savings and Loan Associations to play with deposits that were insured by… Continue Reading
• Power in the US V: Reaganomics and Class Division - Ronald Wilson Reagan was inaugurated as 40th President on January 20, 1981, launching the “Reagan Revolution” under the banner of “conservatism.” But Reagan’s conservatism was not the community oriented traditional philosophy with that name, but rather the new libertarian brand promulgated by Barry Goldwater and William Buckley. Edmund Burke was out and Ayn Rand was… Continue Reading
• Power in the US IV: The Re-Org - From the Civil War through World War II, power in America lay with the WASP Ascendancy, an Eastern leadership class with colonial roots and Ivy League diplomas. After the War, a triumvirate took power: Big Industry, Big Military and Big Government. On the one hand, the triumvirs had an easy time of it as the… Continue Reading
• Power in the US III: Newtonian Politics - The WASP Ascendancy was born of the Civil War and lasted until WW II. As the country soldiered on and emerged victorious on VE Day and VJ Day, it was more or less worthy of the name United States. But the new US Power Elite - the troika of Big Government, Big Industry and Big… Continue Reading
• Power in the US II: The “Après-Guerre” - The US emerged from WWII more powerful and more united than ever. The baby-boom was about to begin and a new middle class would be built by the combination of strong labor unions, the GI Bill, access to higher education and 30 years of economic prosperity all to the tune of a top income tax… Continue Reading
• Power in the US I:The WASP Ascendancy - My late friend Alex was a holocaust survivor who landed in New York as a refugee after World War II, a young man who then went on to create a new life for himself here. A teenager when the War broke out, Alex shared the story of how he was shipped across Europe from camp… Continue Reading
• AI VIII: Software, Hardware, Data and China - Work on Artificial Intelligence systems continues apace. But one must ask whether this juggernaut could run into obstacles that would seriously slow it down? Jaron Lanier, a Virtual Reality pioneer and now a researcher now at Microsoft, points out that all this acceleration in AI so far has been based on hardware (solid state physics/engineering)… Continue Reading
• Fascism and Trumpism - George Santayana famously wrote "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Perhaps a lesson from the 1930s can be applied to help understand the phenomenon of the Donald Trump presidency and its relation to Fascism. Georges Bataille was a prolific French writer, philosopher and activist from the 1920s through the 1950s.… Continue Reading
• AI VII: Humankind and Machinekind - On the road to the Technological Singularity where machine intelligence catches up to human intelligence, we are seeing a symbiosis of mankind and machinekind taking place what with nanobots, brain implants, genetic engineering, etc. The essence of the humankind/machinekind co-evolution was captured by Marshall McLuhan. In Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man, he wrote… Continue Reading
• AI VI: Towards the Singularity - The next decade (2020-2030) will see the 3rd Wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Given the dazzling progress during the 2nd Wave, expectations are high. Another reason for this optimism is that technology feeds on itself and continually accelerates – for  example, Moore’s Law: the power of computer chips doubles every 18 months. For the coming… Continue Reading
• AI V: The Random and the Quantum - As children, we first encounter randomness in flipping a coin to see who goes first in a game or in shuffling cards for Solitaire - nothing terribly dramatic. Biological evolution, on the other hand, uses randomness in some of the most important processes of life such as the selection of genes for transfer from parent… Continue Reading
• AI IV: Exponential Growth - The phenomenon of exponential growth is having an impact on the way Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bringing us to the Technological Singularity, the point at which machine intelligence will catch up to human intelligence – and surpass it quickly thereafter. The phenomenon of exponential growth is also much with us today because of the Corona… Continue Reading
• AI III: Connectionism - DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a part of the US Department of Defense that has played a critical role in funding scientific projects since WW II, among them the ARPANET which has morphed into the Internet and the World Wide Web. DARPA has also been an important source of funding for research… Continue Reading
• Pandas and Pandemics - After the Chinese invasion and takeover of Tibet in the 1950s, China became a practitioner of panda diplomacy where it would send those cuddly bears to zoos around the world to improve relations with various countries. But back then, China was still something of a sleepy economic backwater. Napoleon once opined “Let China sleep, for… Continue Reading
• AI II : First Wave — 1950 – 2000 - Alan Turing was a Computer Science pioneer whose brilliant and tragic life has been the subject of books, plays and films – most recently The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch. Turing and others were excited by the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the outset, in Turing’s case at least from 1941. In his 1950… Continue Reading
• AI I: Pre-History — 500 BC to 1950 AD - Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the technology that is critical to getting humanity to the Promised Land of the Singularity, where machines will be as intelligent as human beings. The roots of modern AI can be traced to attempts by classical philosophers to describe human thinking in systematic terms. Aristotle’s syllogism exploited the idea that there… Continue Reading
• Toward the Singularity - Futurology is the art of predicting the technology of the future. N.B. We say “futurology” because the term “futurism” denotes the Italian aesthetic movement “Il Futurismo”: it began with manifestos - Manifesto del Futurismo (1909) which glorified the technology of the automobile and its speed and power followed by two manifestos on technology and music,… Continue Reading
• Accelerationism II - Accelerationism is a philosophical movement that emerged from the work of late 20th century disillusioned Marxist-oriented French philosophers who were confronted with the realization that capitalism cannot be controlled by current political institutions nor supplanted by the long awaited revolution: for centuries now, the driving force of modernity has been capitalism, the take-no-prisoners social-economic system… Continue Reading
• The Constitution – then and now - In the US, the Constitution plays the role of sacred scripture and the word unconstitutional has the force of a curse. The origin story of this document begins in Philadelphia in 1787 with the Constitutional Convention. Jefferson and Adams, ambassadors to England and France, did not attend; Hamilton and Franklin did; Washington presided. It was… Continue Reading
• Accelerationism I - The discipline of Philosophy has been part of Western Culture for two and a half millennia now, from the time of the rise of the Greek city states to the present day. Interestingly, a new philosophical system often arises in anticipation of new directions for society and for history. Thus the Stoicism of Zeno and… Continue Reading
• Ranked Choice Voting - In 2016, the State of Maine voted to apply ranked choice voting in congressional and gubernatorial elections and then in 2018 voted to extend this voting process to the allocation of its electoral college votes. Recently, the New York Times ran an editorial calling for the Empire State to consider ranked choice voting; in Massachusetts,… Continue Reading
• The Third Person VIII: The Fall of Rome - St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was the last great intellectual figure of Western Christianity in the Roman Empire. His writings on election and pre-destination, on original sin, on the theory of a just war and on the Trinity had a great influence on the medieval Church, in particular on St Thomas; he also had a… Continue Reading
• The Third Person VII: The Established Religion - During Augustus’ reign as Emperor of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana settled over the Mediterranean world – with the notable exception of Judea (Palestine, the Holy Land). After the beheading of John the Baptist and the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, unrest continued - leading to the Jewish-Roman Wars (66-73, 115-117, 132-135), the destruction… Continue Reading
• Brexit - Brexit is a portmanteau word meaning “British exit from the European Union.” The referendum on Brexit in the UK in 2016 won by means of a majority of less than 2% of the votes cast representing less than 34% of the voting age population. The process took place in the worst possible conditions – false… Continue Reading
• The Third Person VI: The Pax Romana - From the outset in the New Testament, the Epistles and Gospels talk of “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” God the Father came from Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible; the Son was Jesus of Nazareth, an historical figure. For the Holy Spirit, things are more complicated. For sources, there are the Dead Sea… Continue Reading
• The Drums of War - The history of civilization was long taught in schools as the history of its wars – battles and dates. Humans are unique this way: male animals fight amongst themselves for access to females but leave each other exhausted and maybe wounded but not dead. What cultural or biological function does war among humans actually have?… Continue Reading
• The Third Person V: The Redacted Goddess - From the Hebrew Bible itself, it is clear that Canaanite polytheism persisted among the Israelites throughout nearly all the Biblical period; this is attested to by the golden calf, by the constant re-appearances of Baal, by the lamentations and exhortations of the prophets, etc. What recent scholarship has brought to the fore, however, is that… Continue Reading
• The Third Person IV: El and Yahweh - Quietly, in post-Biblical Judaism, there arises an actor, God’s Shekinah, who substitutes for God in interactions with the material world. The term Shekinah does not occur in the Hebrew Bible. It did not originate among the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria or Antioch. It did not originate among the Pharisees at the Temple in Jerusalem. It… Continue Reading
• The Third Person III: The Shekinah - To help track the Jewish origins of the Christian Holy Spirit, there is a rich rabbinical literature to consider, a literature which emerged as the period of Biblical writing came to an end in the centuries just before the advent of Christianity. Already in the pre-Christian era, the rabbis approached the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible)… Continue Reading
• Esther, Trump and Blasphemy - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently (March 21, 2019) asserted that Donald Trump’s support for Israeli annexation of the Golan-Heights has anti-Iranian biblical antecedents. The annexation would strengthen Israel's position vis-à-vis pro-Iranian forces in Syria. Calling it a "Purim Miracle," Netanyahu cited the Book of Esther where purportedly Jews killed Persians in what is today Iran… Continue Reading
• The Third Person II: The Wisdom Literature - The rabbinical term for the Hebrew Bible is the Tanakh; the term was introduced in the Middle Ages and is an acronym drawn from the Hebrew names for the three sections of the canonical Jewish scriptures: Torah (Teachings), Neviim (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings). The standard Hebrew text of the Tanakh was compiled in the Middle… Continue Reading
• The Third Person I : The Holy Spirit - To Christians, the Holy Spirit (once known as the Holy Ghost in the English speaking world) is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, along with God the Father and God the Son. Indeed for Protestants and Catholics, the Nicene Creed reads     "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of… Continue Reading
• Liberal Semantics - The word “liberal” originated in Latin, then made its way into French and from there into English. The Oxford English Dictionary gives this as its primary definition “Willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.” However, it also has a political usage as in “the liberal senator… Continue Reading
• Conservative Semantics - Conservatism as a political philosophy traces its roots to the late 18th century: its intellectual leaders were the Anglo-Irish Member of Parliament Edmund Burke and the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith. In his speeches and writings, Burke extolled tradition, the “natural law” and “natural rights”; he championed social hierarchy, an established church, gradual social… Continue Reading
• The Roberts Court -   In 2005, with the retirement of Justice Rehnquist, John Roberts was named to the position of Chief Justice by Republican president George W. Bush. Another change in Court personnel occurred in 2008 when Sandra Day O’Connor retired and was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito. With Roberts and Alito, the Court had an even more… Continue Reading
• Bush v. Gore - In 1986, when Warren Burger retired, Ronald Reagan promoted Associate Justice William Rehnquist to the position of Chief Justice and nominated Antonin Scalia to fill Rehnquist’s seat. This created a solid conservative kernel on the Court consisting of the five justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O’Connor and Kennedy; there was also Justice John Paul Stevens (appointed… Continue Reading
• The Warren Court, Part B - In the period from 1953-1969, Earl Warren became the most powerful Chief Justice since John Marshall as he led the Court through a dazzling series of rulings that established the judiciary as a more than equal partner in government – an outcome deemed impossible by Alexander Hamilton in his influential paper Federalist 78 and an outcome… Continue Reading
• The Warren Court, Part A - Turning to the courts when the other branches of government would not act was the technique James Otis and the colonists resorted to in the period before the American Revolution, the period when the Parliament and the Crown would not address “taxation without representation.” Like the colonists, African-Americans had to deal with a government that… Continue Reading
• Business and Baseball - The twentieth century began in 1901. Teddy Roosevelt became President after William McKinley’s assassination by an anarchist at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo NY. This would prove a challenging time for the Supreme Court and judicial review. By the end of the century the power and influence of the Court over life in America… Continue Reading
• The Dred Scott Decision - Early in its history, the U.S. Supreme Court applied judicial review to acts of Congress. First here was Hylton v. United States (1796) and there was Marbury v. Madison (1803); with these cases the Court’s power to decide the constitutionality of a law was established - constitutional in the first case, unconstitutional in the second.… Continue Reading
• The Discovery Doctrine - John Marshall, the Federalist from Virginia and legendary fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is celebrated today for his impact on the U.S. form of government. To start, there is the decision Marbury v. Madison in 1803. In this ruling, the Court set a far-reaching precedent by declaring a law passed by Congress and signed… Continue Reading
• Marbury v. Madison - The Baron de Montesquieu and James Madison believed in the importance of the separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. However, their view was that the third branch would not have power equal to that of either of the first two but enough so that no one branch would overpower… Continue Reading
• Voting Arithmetic - Voting is simple when there are only two candidates and lots of voters: people vote and one of the candidates will simply get more votes than the other (except in the very unusual case of a tie when a coin is needed). In other words, the candidate who gets a majority of the votes wins;… Continue Reading
• The Constitution – U.S Scripture III - In 1787, the Confederation Congress called for a Constitutional Convention with the goal of replacing the Articles of Confederation with a form of government that had the central power necessary to lead the states and the territories. This had to be a document very different from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, from the Union… Continue Reading
• The Articles – U.S. Scripture II - The second text of U.S. scripture, the Articles of Confederation, gets much less attention than the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Still it set up the political structure by which the new country was run for its first thirteen years; it provided the military structure to win the war for independence; it furnished the… Continue Reading
• The Declaration – U.S. Scripture I - There are three founding texts for Americans, texts treated like sacred scripture. The first is the Declaration of Independence, a stirring document both political and philosophical; in schools and elsewhere, it is read and recited with religious spirit. The second is the Articles of Confederation; a government based on this text was established by the… Continue Reading
• Champagne - The Rule of St Benedict goes back to the beginning of the Dark Ages. Born in the north of Italy at the end of the 5th century, at the end of the Roman Empire, Benedict is known as the Father of Western Monasticism; he laid down a social system for male religious communities that was… Continue Reading
• North America III - When conditions allowed, humans migrated across the Bering Land Bridge moving from Eurasia to North America thousands of years before the voyages of discovery of Columbus and other European navigators. That raises the question whether there were Native Americans who encountered Europeans before Columbus. If so, were these encounters of the first, second or third… Continue Reading
• North America II - At various times in history, the continents of Eurasia and North America have been connected by the Bering Land Bridge which is formed when water levels recede and the Bering Sea is filled in (click  HERE for a dynamic map that shows changes in sea level over the last 21,000 years). When conditions allowed, humans (with… Continue Reading
• North America I - Once upon a time, there was a single great continent – click HERE – called Pangaea. It formed 335 million years ago, was surrounded by the vast Panthalassic Ocean and only began to break apart about 175 million years ago. North America dislodged itself from Pangaea and started drifting west; this went on until its plate rammed… Continue Reading
• Gold Coin to Bit Coin - The myth of Midas is about the power of money – it magically transforms everything in its path and turns it into something denominated by money itself. The Midas story comes from the ancient lands of Phrygia and Lydia, in western modern day Turkey, close to the Island of Lesbos and to the Ionian Greek… Continue Reading
• Louisiana - At the very beginning of the 1600’s, explorers from England (Gosnold), Holland (Hudson and Block) and France (Champlain) nosed around Cape Cod and other places on the east coast of North America. Within a very short time, New England, New Netherland and New France were founded along with the English colony in Virginia; New Sweden… Continue Reading
• Babylon - The modern world uses a number system built around 10, the decimal system. Things are counted and measured in tens and powers of ten. Thus we have 10 years in a decade, 100 years in a century and 1000 years in a millennium. On the other hand, the number 60 pops up in some interesting… Continue Reading
• Battle Creek - Battle Creek is a city of some 50,000 inhabitants in southwestern Michigan situated at the point where the Battle Creek River flows into the Kalamazoo River. The name Battle Creek traces back, according to local lore, to a skirmish between U.S. soldiers and Native Americans in the winter of 1823-1824. At the beginning of the… Continue Reading
• Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway famously favored Anglo-Saxon words and phrases over Latin or French ones: thus “tell” and not “inform.”  Scholars, critics and Nobel Prize committees have analyzed passages such as “What do you have to eat?” the boy asked. “A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some.” “No, I will eat at home;… Continue Reading
• Ireland - Ireland is known as the Land of Saints and Scholars, as the Emerald Isle, as the Old Sod … . For all its faults, it is the only place in Europe that has never invaded a neighboring or distant land militarily. That doesn’t mean that the Irish weren’t always making war on one other. Still,… Continue Reading
• America - Countries are sometimes named for tribes (France, England, Poland), sometimes for rivers (India, Niger, Congo, Zambia), sometimes for a crop (Malta, honey), sometimes for a city in Italy (Venezuela, Venice), sometimes for the name Marco Polo brought back from China (Japan), sometimes for a geographic feature (Montenegro), sometimes with a portmanteau word (Tanzania = Tanganyika… Continue Reading
• Continents - The world is divided into innumerable islands and seven continents. These seven have Latinate names which were created various ways and which then were adopted and perpetuated by European mapmakers. So, to start, how did these names of the three continents known to the ancient Western World come down to us: Europe, Africa and Asia?… Continue Reading
• Brooklyn - The Brooklyn NY subway map shows a predilection for heroes of the American War of Independence: 13 subway stops in all. This total is to be contrasted with Manhattan’s paltry 2, Boston’s measly 2 and Philadelphia’s disgraceful 0. This expression of patriotism in Brooklyn has its roots in the way streets and avenues were named… Continue Reading
• Inventors: TV and FM - Who invented the light bulb; answer, Edison. Who invented the cotton gin; answer Eli Whitney. Who invented radio; answer, Marconi. Who invented television; mystère. By television, we mean the black-and-white “boob tube” of the late 1940’s and 1950’s – the medium Marshall McLuhan wrote about, not the color-rich flat screen marvel of today. In those… Continue Reading
• Jean-Louis -   Why is it that Frenchmen all seem to have these double names: Jean-Louis, Jean-Jacques, Jean-Claude, Jean-Francois, Pierre-Marie, and more. Likewise on the distaff side, we have Marie-Claude, Marie-Therese, Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Paul, Anne-Marie, and more. Why all the hyphenated names? Why the dually gendered names? Aren’t there enough simple names to go around? Mystère. Well, it… Continue Reading
• Joshua and Jesus - In the Hebrew Bible Joshua succeeds Moses as the leader of the Israelites and leads the invasion of the Land of Caanan. Most spectacularly, in the Book of Joshua, with the aid of trumpets and the Lord’s angels, he conquers the walled city of Jericho - an event recounted in the wonderful spiritual “Joshua Fit… Continue Reading
• California - California is called the Golden State and lives up to its billing. It is truly a magical place – the coast line, the rivers and bays, the sierras, the deserts, the redwoods, the gold rush, the marvelous climate and on and on. Its name could be Spanish. But its name is very unlike those of… Continue Reading
• Plymouth and Cape Cod - Massachusetts is notorious for its peculiar pronunciations, especially of place names. For example, there are Gloucester (GLOSS-TAH) and Worcester (WOO-STAH). And there are confounding inconsistencies:  on Cape Cod, there are opposing pronunciation rules for Chatham (CHATUM) and Eastham (EAST-HAM), two towns within minutes of each other; closer to Boston, the president John Quincy (QUIN-SEE) Adams… Continue Reading