Susan B. Anthony, The Spinster

The radio and on-line program and podcast The Writer’s Almanac reproduces Women’s Rights Activist Susan B. Anthony’s impish justifications for remaining an unmarried woman: Susan B. Anthony was asked so often why she never married that she always had three answers at the ready. One was, “It always happened that the men I wanted were […]

Why Americans are Fascinated by the Meghan Markle-Prince Harry Royal Wedding

On TheAtlantic.com, Sophie Gilbert wonders why so many Americans were fascinated by the Meghan Markle-Prince Harry royal wedding: More than 29 million got up early on a Saturday to watch Meghan Markle marry Prince Harry in a ceremony that plunged the royal family into the 21st century. Markle, of course, “is the old dream come […]

Fake News: Telling the Difference Between Fact and Fiction

Renee Loth writes in The Boston Globe, Fake news is surely not new; most of us have smirked at supermarket tabloids, with their tales of alien invasions and appearances of the Virgin Mary’s visage on a breakfast muffin. What’s missing today is the discernment to tell the difference between Fact or Crap, as a popular […]

Redefining What it Means to Be Japanese

Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka became the first tennis player from Japan to win a Grand Slam singles tournament when she defeated Serena Williams in the final of the 2018 US Open. The New York Times‘s Motoko Rich writes about how Naomi’s victory is pushing Japan to redefine what it means to be Japanese: In […]

In Defense of Corporate Jets

Joe Nocera writes on Bloomberg.com that private jets have long been stand-ins for corporate indulgence: “Nothing looks more excessive and more plutocratic” than a CEO jetting around on a company plane–which means aircraft are “easy targets” when firms want to show shareholders they are cutting costs. Take General Electric. The Wall Street journal recently exposed […]

Life is One Drama After Another

From Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff: Whenever we’re dealing with bad news, a difficult person, or a disappointment of some kind, most of us get into certain habits, ways of reacting to life—particularly adversity that don’t serve us very well. We overreact, blow things out of proportion, hold on too tightly, and focus […]

Royal Wedding, Monarchy-Mania, Trump and Political Dynasties

Theunis Bates, managing editor of The Week (issue date 01-Jun-2018) comments on the relevance of the British monarchy and prevalence of political families that have come to dominate American politics: I am a disloyal British subject. Some 29 million people on this side of the Atlantic woke up early last Saturday to watch Prince Harry […]

The Less-Bullish Case for Apple Stock

In the August 20, 2018, issue of Barron’s, Rupal Bhansali of Ariel Investments discusses why investors should not own the Apple stock: People think of Apple as the poor man’s technology stock. At 16 times forward earnings, it is cheap, compared with Facebook and Netflix. But Apple isn’t a technology company. It’s a consumer-electronics company, […]

Making Kombucha

Kombucha is a fermented, somewhat alcoholic, lightly effervescent, sweetened black or green tea beverage with alleged health benefits. From a profile of Health-Ade’s founder and CEO Daina Trout in Delta Airlines’Sky magazine of May 2018: The effervescent elixir is made from three ingredients—tea, water and sugar—plus a scoby, a starter culture. Trout uses a blend […]

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: Comrades and Adversaries

In his review of Gordon S. Wood’s Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, James Piereson writes in The New Criterion: And though they clashed spectacularly when they faced off as presidential candidates in 1800, that rocky period was bracketed by a fruitful alliance during the Revolutionary War era and a late-in-life reconciliation that carried […]