26th September 2022
When I was younger, okay a lot younger, I quite often got the old “you know who you look exactly like” approach. Usually I had to take their word for it, which I did immediately so we could move on, but in one case I was led to my twin. It was at a trade […]
Read More
18th August 2022
Corporations taking over a frat house? That’s got to be one step jollier than wine in the conference room to toast the retirement of Melvin in Accounts. What got me thinking along these lines was a story coming out of the World Athletic Championships in Eugene, Oregon, an unassuming college town of 180,000 taxpayers and […]
Read More
15th July 2022
Naked ambition, nudity and the New York Times make strange bedfellows. I have written before about the aspirational aspects of the New York Times’s home page. Sure, there’s a healthy serving of news, op-eds, trends, entertainment. Increasingly however, there are subtle and not-so-subtle items that nudge the reader in the right (on) direction. All sorts […]
Read More
13th June 2022
Talk about grooms, toons and 21st century romances. Hatsune Miku is a sixteen-year-old virtual pop star who performs to live audiences and collaborates with real pop stars. On one level she is a sassy, you-go-girl singer with huge luminous eyes, a small O of a mouth and a nose suggested by a tiny pencil slip. […]
Read More
5th April 2022
I’m not going to add to the endless opinion pieces on the Ukrainian invasion. It seems as if every columnist, talking head, blogger and pocket historian has been holding forth on various aspects of this desperately familiar tragedy. I can save you a lot of time by declaring that nobody knows 1) what’s in Putin’s […]
Read More
15th February 2022
I’ve been thinking about love potions lately. And no, the cause is not the usual rising of sap as the sun climbs higher in the sky. What set me off was this this article in the NY Times about a company in Boston, Gingko, that uses mRNA technology, the wizardry behind the Pfizer and Moderna […]
Read More
