Along with many others, of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the abortion issue of late. I guess I’ll start these reflections with my first exposure to the procedure, fourth-hand as it was. One of my college friends, in my freshman year at Michigan, had an older roommate who…

Towards a Reasonable Middle: Part 1 — A little over a century ago, Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote what is probably his most famous poem: “The Second Coming.” The cultural context for the poem was, in some ways, similar to ours today: the 1918–1919 flu pandemic was still active, the First World War had recently ended…

A couple of things that happened recently got me cogitating on the idea of language as playground. First, I had a chance to hear Anne Curzan speak. Curzan is the talented and engaging dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan (my alma…

I recently read with some interest a new post titled “Why I Don’t Believe in PKMs based on Plain Text Files,” authored by my fellow medium writer Paco Cantero. He makes the case for storing your notes — information, personal knowledge, whatever — in a database, rather than in plain…

As the pandemic eases, increasing numbers of companies and employees are running out of health-related reasons why everyone who can work from home needs to do so. And yet employees have gotten used to skipping the daily commute, have proven that they can remain productive in their pajamas, and are…

Based on a recently leaked draft majority opinion, it now seems virtually certain that Roe v. Wade will be overturned by the US Supreme Court sometime this summer. I say this because the arguments contained in the leaked draft really leave no room for ambiguity or doubt or equivocation: they…

Democracy as a form of government doesn’t seem to be getting much respect these days. Instead, autocracy seems to be gaining ground, increasingly demanding to be taken seriously on the stage of world affairs. We frequently hear that democracy and Western values no longer work in the 21st century, that…

I have a few things I’d like to say about the 94th Academy Awards that took place this last Sunday. One thing I’m not going to tell you is whether I condone violence under any circumstances. I live in a society in which violence occurs daily in many forms —…

The War in Ukraine: What’s at Stake We all have to work out the proper balance between short-term and long-term consequences. If I eat this cookie, I will enjoy it now, but regret it when I step on the scales tomorrow. If I have a few more drinks, then I’ll…