In 2019, contributor to this site Robert S. Griffin compiled a collection of his short writings on a variety of topics called What Came to Mind: Thoughts Late in Life. For the book, Dr. Griffin gave himself a page limit—three hundred pages. Staying within that quota, he selected thoughts, as he called them, posted on […]
In publications like this one, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1840–1900) comes up a lot. Just about everybody knows his maxim, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Or at least some version of it, the wording varies from speaker to speaker. Sometimes the reference is “us” rather than “me”: the 1982 movie “Conan the Barbarian” […]
Prominent on the front page of the February 14th New York Times is a feature story—“14 MIN READ” it said (most articles are two to six minutes), nine pictures, billed as “The Great Read”– by Times’ opinion columnist Maureen Dowd called “Live From New York, It’s Lorne Michaels: The man who made ‘Saturday Night Live’ […]
I first titled this writing “Thoughts on the Presidential Election” but immediately realized I didn’t need the word “Presidential.” What other election is there? Come to think of it, that gets at the main point of this piece: to my way of thinking, this presidential election was far too big a show — to the […]
Jeannette Rankin My daughter Dee, as I’ll call her here, has just finished her sophomore year in college. One of the jobs I’ve taken on is to direct her to sources and people she’s not encountering in her life—in school, mass entertainment, and the internet (which looks to me to come down to wall-to-wall TikTok). […]
