March 2011
12 posts
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“The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them.”
– John Seely Brown
February 2011
26 posts
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How Defeat Foretold Victory →
I walked by Stephane Dion’s empty office a few days ago. It reminded me of something I wrote following the last election…
Overall, the election didn’t change much about our government, but I think it will (or should) have an effect on the Liberal Party, which is the topic of this entry. Stephane Dion never really had a chance. Though it was especially crucial in the face of...
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Are you an Architect? →
Apparently I’m not. Kind of relieved. They must be unbearable people.
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Whence Savings? →
In the old days, Americans loved being “forced to save.” They didn’t want to touch the money. I thought I could make a living as an ERISA lawyer, suing pension funds and helping participants. Well, I had to take on another career.
Maybe the career I should have picked was writing books accusing people of moral turpitude. Of course, in theory we can all save — even the poor. I am...
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On Changing The Rules →
Who won has long been forgotten, but it was one of the greatest games of Monopoly ever played because we got to change the rules.
Between critiques of Watson’s Jeopardy victory and talk about this new automated version of Monopoly, there’s been a lot of talk on the NY Times about the importance of challenging rules and thinking critically.
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For some time I believed that it was I who died, not they. That the rest of the world had carried on without me; that the story I’d been told was merely the stuff of hellfire. The adult mind employs more sophistication but it tells the same fables to itself. The sensation of having escaped and lived on becomes a solipsism, a trick of evaporating consciousness or, if you like, an anodyne...
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Ronald Wright on Civilization
“Tell me this, David. What is civilization?”
How would you have handled that one, Anita? Like you I’ve never attached moral baggage to the C word. The Roman circus, the Inquisition, the Nazi camps, the bomb- the uncivilized did no worse. So I stuck to a technical definition: a society on a certain scale, of a certain complexity. Like the glen, I said, but thousands of times...
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