On the recommendation of my vaunted National Geographic, I am listening to Cave of Bones by Lee Berger, the paleoanthropologist who is arguably the most prolific and controversial fossil hunter of his generation. I love antiquities and spent a fair amount of time in my youth hunting fossils and artifacts from places like burial mounds. I have a meaningful collection of pre-Colombian art that I dug up in Costa Rica when I was living there…
For 86 days now, 26 more than allowed for under the War Powers Act, we have been reading about and listening to war news from the Middle East. The War Powers Act (formally the War Powers Resolution) was passed by Congress in November 1973 over President Nixon’s veto in the aftermath of Vietnam. It is one of the most important and most consistently violated pieces of legislation in American constitutional history. The immediate context in…
Have you heard about the agnostic, dyslexic insomniac? He stays up all night wondering if there’s a Claude. Oh my Claude! I cannot believe all that I am reading and hearing this morning and it is blowing my mind (which the AI world now calls a “meat computer”). How do I unpack this best? I must start with Pope Leo XIV…I absolutely LOVE the guy. I didn’t think I could love a Pope more than…
I am listening to James Clavell’s well-known novel about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Whirlwind. You might think I did this purposefully because of our current situation in Iran, but that’s simply not the case. I was watching some old movie and the protagonist, a troubled young man, was reading Clavell’s King Rat, the story of a Japanese POW camp in Thailand in 1945, and I remembered how much I liked Clavell’s Asian series…
The phrase “Women: can’t live with them and can’t live without them” has a surprisingly deep lineage. The most ancient roots of the sentiment (perhaps not the exact wording), goes back to the Ancient Greek writer of comedy, Aristophanes, who expressed the core idea in Lysistrata in 411 B.C. Lysistrata is one of the most audacious comedies ever written and yet it was written during the brutal later years of the Peloponnesian War (Athens vs.…
I did something today that I have only done a handful of times since 2020, but which I have done countless times over the course of my life. In fact, maybe I can count the times. I would estimate that I’ve done it over 700 times, and with a few exceptions along the way, I’ve always done it with different people. I’m not so different than most men my age in this regard. I probably…
Back when I was in college, I had a roommate named Gary who I still see every once in a blue moon. Gary is a very smart guy who always had a finger on the pulse of popular culture, perhaps more than most. For some reason, I always remember one of the things he said during freshman year, long before my mind had turned from dreams of being an engineer (like most boys, I had…
A few years ago, Olivia Newton John regrettably fell prey to her long battle with breast cancer. She was 73, so way too young. She began her career in the late 1960s in Australia and the UK, and made her Billboard Hot 100 debut in 1971. She built a reputation as a soft-spoken country-pop singer, winning the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1974. Her 1974 hit I Honestly Love You went to…
This morning I’m thinking about a riff on Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.” One of literature’s great ironies is that even while surrounded by ocean, one can die of thirst. The irony of the name…and my name…is not lost on me. The quote is rich with symbolism and paradox. The poem itself captures Coleridge’s symbolism of the albatross, which stands for sin and…
Gold may be the single most consequential material in human history. Gold was almost certainly the first metal humans ever worked, simply because it occurs in pure form in nature with no smelting required. The oldest known gold artifacts date to around 4,600 BC, found in the Varna Necropolis in modern Bulgaria. Those were grave goods that already suggest gold’s association with status, divinity, and the afterlife. Egypt became the ancient world’s great gold power.…