A woman who had been living in a quiet Pontiac-Michigan neighborhood was recently found dead in her garage. Her body had mummified. She had been dead for six years! In other words, for six years this woman had not been seen or even glimpsed of and no one had taken notice. For six years this woman’s mail had been piling up at the post office

The teacher in one of my graduate-school English classes, a Maine Yankee self-exiled to the Midwest, once declared, with a twinkle in his eye, that there was no irony in Iowa. In hindsight, I think Professor Huntress made this statement largely because he liked the alliterative aspect of it. Even so, I had lived in Iowa long enough at that point to appreciate that he

A host of near-naked aborigines, their faces smeared with ash and blood, are dancing and whooping against the backdrop of a crackling fire. The night sky is moonless; the ambient darkness featureless. The very ground seems to resonate to a heavy beating of drums. Several attendants begin to prod and stir the fire such as to create lofting bursts of sparks and embers. The gathering

As has become increasingly difficult to deny, human males have been in charge of pretty much everything over the past 200 millennia and have pretty much screwed everything up. Let us count the ways – Lusting after political and economic power Wielding such power over the weak and the vulnerable Waging endless war Inventing ever-more-lethal weapons for waging ever-more endless war Canonizing expediency Marginalizing and

In 2009, the U.S. suffered one of its worst financial crises in its history. Thousands of people were complicit in selling subprime mortgages to people who could not afford them but were assured they could. Thousands of people were complicit in falsifying the documentation and assurances used to support the affordability of these subprime mortgages. Thousands of people were complicit in packaging these subprime mortgages

Human beings are probably as tribal in instinct as any species could ever be. At any particular moment, any particular one of us can identify ourselves as being a member of not one, not a dozen, but likely several dozen tribes of one sort or another. For example, we might identify as being an American citizen, a member of Red Sox Nation, a member of

Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging braggadocio to the contrary, capitalism has pretty much vanquished communism and established itself as the world’s most successful economic ideology. When you think about it, though, how could it have turned out otherwise? In the cause of creating material wealth, which, to the human psyche, represents survival itself, capitalism harnesses the enormous energy of self-interest, while communism (as well as socialism, its

In the eyes of the IRS and U.S. law, a corporation is a ‘person.’ While this view may be a convenience to the IRS and the courts, not to mention a lawyer or two, the rest of us cannot escape the fact that, in order for a corporation to be a person in anything other than the titular sense, it must have, besides a head,

Why are we so fixated on celebrities? Why do we seek them out? Why do we beg for their autographs? Why do we shoot selfies outside their rumored places of residence? Why do we monitor their tweets? Why do we hang on their very public word? Why do we try to make ourselves look like them? Why do we memorialize them with icons and wall-hangings

We are massively connected in our time in one sense; massively dis-connected in another. We are massively connected primarily by way of modern communications systems: Internet, iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Skype, et al. Within seconds, we can be in lingual contact with almost any other human being on the planet. We are also massively connected today by way of modern transportation systems: automobile, airplane,