For a while now I have been noticing the new emergency room series called The Pitt (a play on Pittsburgh, the high intensity and grit, and the fact that ER’s are on the lower level of hospitals) on my Hulu feed. Then my trainer, who is a grad student in kinesiology working towards his Physical Therapy certification, told me I had to watch it, so I did. I loved it. It was incredibly realistic, perhaps…
When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and…
When the term “tribal warfare” has come up, I have always thought of Africa for some reason. When I was traveling to subsaharan Africa almost forty years ago, I was surprised to learn about how much inter-tribe rivalry existed and what a storied history and debate there was about how prevalent it was in the context particularly of a continent beset with a turbulent colonial past and then as a source of the Western Hemisphere’s…
For many years now, when I’ve gone on motorcycle rides that included my friend Frank O’Connell, I would hear about this little toy company that he was involved with. Frank is a marketing guru of significant renown and he also has a connection to the toy business from years ago when he worked for Mattel on the Intelevision product. I know this for two reasons, the first of which is that it’s what business friends…
A few weeks ago and for no particular reason, I downloaded onto my Audible app, a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), one of America’s greatest writers and humorists. Born in Missouri, he grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi River, a setting that would define his most famous work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry…
Drone warfare refers to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct surveillance, reconnaissance, and lethal strike missions, often remotely piloted from thousands of miles away. When I think about drone warfare I think about the movie Eye in the Sky (2015), arguably the best fictional treatment of drone ethics. Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman star in a tense real-time drama about a strike decision with civilian collateral risk. It was excellent on the…
Social Media is a very perplexing arena for me and I find myself thinking about it a lot and pondering its place in the universe. My exposure to it began in 1998 when I invested in a start-up called Six Degrees. The “six degrees of separation” idea comes from a few places. The original concept traces to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who in a 1929 short story called Chains proposed that any two people on…
My stories are organized into six categories that I designate after I’ve written the story and am posting it to my site. I recognize that while I’ve written across all six categories and find that some stories fit neatly into those buckets, I suspect that if I were to redo the blog, i would change and probably expand the categories to better conform with what I actually write about the most. Without trying to construct…
The United States Marine Corps has one of the most storied histories in American military service, spanning over 250 years. The Marines were established in 1775, when the Continental Congress authorized two battalions of Marines to serve as a landing force for the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War. The first Marines were recruited at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, a date and place still celebrated in Corps tradition. After the Revolution, the Corps was briefly…
Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…