The midterms are Tuesday, November 3, a month out from today. Democrats are favored to take the House, and the Senate is close to a coin flip, with a slight edge for the Democrats. While I say a Paul Krugman podcast today that suggested that the House odds were now at 99% in favor of Democrats, the prediction markets, which are the most objective source of sentiment, give Democrats about 85% odds of winning the…
Today I read an article on listening and how to do it better. They called it “reflective listening”. What is reflective listening? Reflective listening is most often used by therapists (remember the “how does that make you feel” questions?). But psychologists who have studied the technique say it’s a tool everyone should have in their back pocket in order to get the most out of our communication with others and therefore in our relationship with…
You’ve heard of the “last mile”. It’s a phrase that ostensibly comes from telecommunications, where it described the final stretch of a network: the copper line, cable, or fiber running from the local exchange or hub to an individual home or business. Telephone engineers had long called this segment the “local loop.” “Last mile” became the popular term, likely in the 1980s–90s as cable, broadband, and telecom deregulation made that final connection the costliest and…
When I receive my monthly National Geographic magazine, I usually put it on my side table next to my spot on the living room sofa. The great thing about NatGeo is that the articles in it are mostly timeless and can be read whenever the spirit moves you. Besides being timeless, most of those articles are also entirely optional in that there is nothing about them that is mandatory reading. They are often fascinating and…
In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a funnel with nine circles. Each circle holds worse sinners than the one above it. It starts with Limbo. Virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized souls, such as Homer, Virgil, and Socrates live here. There’s no torment here, only an eternal longing for God. Then there’s Lust. The lustful are whipped around forever by a violent storm. Many of us live here and we men, especially, shrug and explain this one away…
A few years ago I wrote about my travails in getting fire insurance in the collapsing homeowners insurance market of California. The problem was mostly wildfire related (perhaps some seismic and tsunami in certain areas, but no so much here). Since then we had the devastating Palisades and Altadena fires in L.A. that further crashed down on the heads of insurers and caused the state’s assigned fire risk pool plan, called The FAIR Plan to…
My youngest son, Tom has just finished writing a book. I’m not surprised that he’s a writer because he tends towards the creative end of the spectrum with his primary medium being video and photography. I was also aware that he dabbled in writing. When he told me he was finishing up a book and that he wanted me to read it, I found that mildly amusing and thought it would be a typical first…
Cornell has been a huge part of my life for my entire life. From my earliest days I was aware that my mother had bootstrapped her life as the daughter of Slovak immigrants living in rural Upstate New York by deciding to get herself admitted to Cornell at the age of 16 in the depths of the 1932 Depression. She drove that stepping stone into a life of global adventure that led her eventually to…
Piety is devotion and reverence, most often toward God or religious practice, shown through worship, prayer, and faithful observance. The word comes from the Latin pietas. For the Romans it meant more than religion: it was dutiful loyalty to the gods, to one’s family (especially parents), and to one’s country. Virgil’s “pious Aeneas” is the classic example. That older sense survives in phrases like “filial piety,” meaning devotion to one’s parents. The word can also…
I have mentioned Argentine Ants before, because I have found it fascinating to learn about this phenomenon of nature. Argentine ants are the most common nuisance ant in Southern California. They’re small (about 1/8″), uniformly brown, and travel in long, steady trails. They’re hard to eliminate because they don’t form separate colonies. Instead they build huge “supercolonies” with many queens, so killing the ants you can see does almost nothing. They tend to move indoors…