Dedicated to my friend Masha, who is studying child development. A conversation with her about the importance of a child’s first few years pushed me to finally move this text from the bowels of my computer to cyberspace. A… Read More ›
Plato
If a drug
If a drug is invented at some cost and begins to show promise of making its inventors or their sources of capital large sums of money, it may become impossible to get accurate information about the efficacy of and the… Read More ›
Delusion
{click for Delusion pdf} A woman in her forties told me that, from the time she was 8 years old, her father had been telling her that she was deluded. Even if this memory itself is a delusion, we… Read More ›
Waist deep in a royal pool
At La Quinta Real (the royal manor), a Mexican resort hotel with a restorative view and not so restorative food, I was standing in a swimming pool with a Los Angeles portfolio manager (investment adviser). He asked me, convivially, what… Read More ›
Riffs in advance of a too brief vacation
“Having dressed myself up to be a sex object, I went out of my apartment and was looked at as if I were a sex object. And there was something in this looking that made me really uncomfortable. Why could… Read More ›
The Third Man
At the end of the movie The Third Man—which some polls have elected the greatest movie of all time—there is a sequence that is so blatant in its symbolism as to be corny. Soldiers, police, good guys and bad guys… Read More ›
The Practice of Philosophy
FROM SEQUENCE 2013 November 2013 [click for pdf] A friend told me that every morning upon waking she meditates for an hour. My first reaction to this news was not positive. First thing in the morning nothing has yet… Read More ›
