Ghulf Genes

If April is the cruellest month, as T.S. Eliot has said, Then January is the hardest, its nights the gloomy darkest. Snow does ensconce us...

In another context entirely, I happened across a fact worth celebrating. This January marks the fiftieth anniversary of a cartoon feature in...

Many years ago—and I mean many—I was actively involved supporting a project to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Arzew in Algeria to t...

In looking up how distance is measured in astronomy, I came across something that tells about change in our times. The person who discovered...

One of Monique and John’s Christmas gifts to us was Bananagrams, a Scrabble-like word game—and in selecting this item they once more proved ...

In the current climate of fear, anxiety, and what appears to be intercultural conflict, it is especially important to remember that any and ...

Now that winter has arrived, I am able to complete a series I began last April. The winter picture turned out to be the most difficult—not t...

In my last dream this morning I was standing on a street in front of a big yellow two-, three-storey, very run down building. I faced a big ...

Brigitte and I read an article in the Atlantic titled “The Rise of the New Global Elite.” It is reachable here —and thanks, Monique, for po...

It’s difficult to tell jokes expansively in an air raid shelter when bombs are falling. Brigitte and I are old enough and came from far enou...

This phrase, for me, has over the decades come to be an all-purpose abbreviation for amoral attitudes toward reality—not because intelligenc...

Some purchasers of vanity license plates rise to veritable heights of poetic ambiguity. I encountered an example of this yesterday, a plate ...

Prelude to the French Revolution From “Social Aspects in Interpreting the French Revolution, 1789” by Abha Trivedi, University of Lucknow,...

I’ve commented once before on climates of opinion here , a subject now under intense examination. An article in the New York Times this mor...

In one of the Star Trek films or episodes, one of the characters (Lt. Saavik, I think it was) explains the word sabotage saying that in anc...

This morning came an ordinary telephone call, the voice of an ordinary middle-aged woman, a voice like a neighbor’s, not mellifluous like so...

“Searching on Google is good, but having your friends help you find what you’re looking for is better.” You will find those words here , as ...

I saw it on cable and therefore it’s true Pictures of soldiers? It must be a coup! Odd marks in the mud? That’s surely a gnu! A crawling ...

We feel somber on cloudy, foggy mornings. When the sun’s bright over snow, our bodies reflect the sunshine. What a beautiful day! We’re some...