The Nature of Things

Earlier this week, I read a column in The New York Times by Paul Krugman titled "A Plague of Willful Ignorance"   and later the same day a Washingon Post column titled  "The U.S. is falling behind its peers. Americans - if not their leaders - are starting to notice."   The columns pricked my memory. Hadn't I written something along those same lines a few years ago? A search through the blog archives revealed that my memory was correct. Almost eight years ago in 2012, I had written this post about "The new Know-Nothings." Little could I have guessed at the time to what levels these Know-Nothings would sink. They have left their nineteenth-century forbears in the dust when it comes to willful ignorance. ~~~ Thursday, September 27, 2012 The new Know-Nothings I was reading a  story about Bill Nye, the Science Guy , a couple of days ago when I came across a sentence that literally made me groan out loud. It said, "In June, a Gallup poll revealed that...

I was recently reminded of this book by my blogging friend, Judy Krueger , and I've been thinking about it for a few days. I read it a couple of years ago and loved it but it seems even more timely now as so many of us are sheltering in place. Our shelters have become increasingly important to us. And what of those who have no shelter? The characters in this book faced that prospect. ~~~ Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver: A review Is it my flawed memory or have there been an unusual number of new books out this year that have featured a house as a central character? It seems to me that many of the books that I've read recently have had a house as an important element in the plot. And now here comes Barbara Kingsolver's contribution to the genre. Perhaps the emphasis on houses - shelters - is a reflection of the unsettled times in which we live when it seems only natural to long for sanctuary and asylum from the daily onslaught of ineptitude, bel...

I just realized that I completely forgot to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog which actually occurred exactly one week ago on December 5. But in honor of that, here's one of my past posts from 2015. It still has some relevance I think. ~~~ Tuesday, January 13, 2015 Something to think about With age comes wisdom - or so I've heard. But my own experience in life often makes me question that. Still, we'd like to believe that we do learn from our experiences and maybe even become just a wee bit wiser as we get older. A friend sent me this email of  "Lessons that we learn as we age."  See if any of them ring a bell with you. ~~~ Age 5 : I've learned that I like my teacher because she cries when we sing "Silent Night." Age 7 : I've learned that our dog doesn't want to eat my broccoli either. Age 9 : I've learned that when I wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back. Age 12 : I've learned that just when...

I recently came across this post that I wrote almost ten years ago in December 2009. It blew me away to remember that I once felt like this; to remember that I had utter confidence in the leader of our country to try to do what was right and just, whether or not I agreed with his interpretation of that. Those were simpler, more innocent times. ~~~  Wednesday, December 16, 2009 Confronting evil I'm not a big fan of David Brooks and I admit I don't often read his column in  The New York Times , but a couple of days ago, he wrote one which had a title that intrigued me. It was  "Obama's Christian Realism." The gist of the column was that President Obama's thought processes are revealed by his speeches and that his public speeches, taken as a whole, have reflected a remarkably consistent philosophy throughout. It is essentially that there is evil in the world which must be confronted, and, as Brooks states it, that "life is a struggle to push back against the...

I was thinking about this book earlier today and went back to read my review of it in 2014. Unfortunately, I found that, once again, I couldn't remember a lot of detail. The review brought it all back. ~~~ Monday, June 23, 2014 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A review One Hundred Years of Solitude  by  Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez My rating:  5 of 5 stars It's a good thing the writer and/or publisher decided to place a Buendia family tree chart at the beginning of this novel. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to keep track of all the Jose Arcadios, Aurelianos, Amarantas, Ursulas, and Remedios that keep recurring throughout the multiple generations of the family that we meet in  One Hundred Years of Solitude . Even referring to the chart with each new chapter, it was not easy to keep them all straight. But then there is nothing easy about this book. I first read it many years ago - in the '70s or 80s, I think - but when Gabriel Garcia Marque...

Little did I know when I wrote this post back in the fall of 2013 that the problem that I was describing was going to get so much worse in the years to come. Television news was to become a megaphone for lying liars who could not speak without lying and it would never call them out for their lies. Instead, they blast those lies at an easily led public twenty-four hours a day. Is it any wonder that the public is no longer able to recognize the truth? What passes for "truth" these days is whatever you can get the most people to believe. I never watch television news anymore. I gave up on it in 2016. I read that some television journalists now actually do call a lie a lie. Better late than never, I guess. Not Chuck "That's not my job!" Todd though. He's still peddling the same "he said, she said," "both sides do it" shit.  ~~~ Thursday, September 19, 2013 Should journalists point out blatant lies that politicians tell? During a segment on ...

I read recently that a remake of the movie Dune is in the works and will be released next year. The first version, released in 1984, was not a great success. I remember seeing it in the theater and being rather underwhelmed, but I saw it several years later on television and actually sort of liked it. It's a bit of a cult favorite these days. The books were quite another matter. I LOVED the books! I read all in the series authored by Frank Herbert, though I never moved on to the ones authored by his son after Herbert's death. They were great works of the imagination and there seemed to be quite a bit of truth there that was relevant to our own society. That relevance may be even more evident today than it was when the books were first published. In 2015 for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first book, I reread it and wrote my review. I was just as gobsmacked by the book the second time around as when I first read it all those years ago. ~~~   Friday, August ...

Looking back at some of my old blog posts from years ago, I came across this one which is just more evidence that there is nothing new under the sun. Intolerance and hate have been with us forever and were alive and well nine years ago - as they are today. ~~~ Monday, February 22, 2010 What rock did these guys crawl from under? I don't even know how to begin to say anything sensible about this  state legislator from Virginia : State Delegate Bob Marshall of Manassas says disabled children are God's punishment to women who have aborted their first pregnancy. He made that statement Thursday at a press conference to oppose state funding for Planned Parenthood. "The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children," said Marshall, a Republican. "In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and...

Five years ago this month, I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. It's a book whose theme has stayed with me in the five years since. Today there is even more evidence that Earth is undergoing the sixth extinction (that we know about) in the history of the planet and, in fact, that that extinction is snowballing. It is not a comforting thought. ~~~ Thursday, February 27, 2014 The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert: A review The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  by  Elizabeth Kolbert My rating:  4 of 5 stars "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."                                  - Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich As far as science has been able to determine, there have been five mass extinctions of life on Earth in the history of our planet. The first of these occurred at the end of the Ordovician period of th...

I'm currently reading Ian Rankin's latest John Rebus novel, In a House of Lies . It dropped into my Kindle queue on New Year's Eve and I pounced on it. It'd been a while since the last Rebus book and I was thirsty for a visit with my old friend. All of which got me to thinking about when Rankin retired Rebus eight years ago. He published what was supposed to be his last book featuring the iconic Edinburgh detective, Exit Music . He moved on to other protagonists including Rebus' protege, Siobhan Clarke, and an anti-corruption detective named Malcolm Fox.  But Rankin learned, just like that other Scottish writer of detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle, that there are some detectives that just refuse to shuffle off the stage. These days Rebus, who always aged more or less in real time, is nudging his eighth decade, fighting COPD, a consequence of all those years of cigarettes and booze, and still emotionally connected, even in retirement, to the job that is his life,...

We have been watching the HBO production, My Brilliant Friend , based on Elena Ferrante's work. Like many Ferrante fans, I was concerned about how television would treat the work and if it would be able to adequately interpret in video this intimate and interior literary portrait of a female friendship in a brutal patriarchal society. I needn't have worried. At least in my opinion, they have done quite an admirable job. Part of the key to the successful production was to film it in Italian, the language in which the books were written, with English subtitles. This can be a clunky way of presenting material, but in this case, it works to help establish the fraught atmosphere of Naples in the 1950s. It was a time and a place where violence was part of the everyday lives of the people. Particularly the lives of women and children. It was a society were bruises on the faces and arms of women or children were not even noticed because they were so common and taken for granted. This i...

Six years ago, in July 2012, I read and reviewed Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam . It hit me right in the solar plexus. Rereading my review today, a couple of days after our most recent election, I was once again struck by Tuchman's clear-eyed view of history and of human nature. Her observations are just as fresh today as they were when this book was published in 1984 or when I read it in 2012. I venture to predict that they will remain fresh as long as humans continue to exist. A couple of sentences of my own review seem particularly cogent and applicable today, also: " When we see or hear evidence that contradicts our ingrained beliefs and what we want to believe because it makes us feel good, we just ignore it. That is the essence of human folly." ~~~ Monday, July 23, 2012 The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman: A review George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it....