Nine predictions for 2016
In the spirit of making this an annual exercise in humility, here are my 9 predictions for 2016:2016 comes in at the second hottest year on record, just behind 2015.Clinton / O'Malley handily defeats...
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Down to the future
This is an old chart that my father drew up over 30 years ago, around the time I was starting in college, and the global population was 4.7 billion. The brown line at the top represents available...
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Enoughness and the Age of Consumer Capitalism, part 1
trees reflected in a winter poolThere is nothing more destructive to capitalism than the satisfied customer.Lately, much of my work professionally is focused on reviving American practices of...
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Enoughness and the Age of Consumer Capitalism, part 2
This is the continuation of my earlier post on Enoughness . . .Consumerism lies at the heart of our current civilization. I don't mean we like shopping. I mean that buying stuff stands at the very...
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Wintery interlude
Midway through a too-mild February (coaxed-up shoots of daffodil and snowdrop) a pair of snowstorms and arctic blast return us brutally to winter:16 below zero, then to 10 above in breezy daylight, and...
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Democracy within Plutocracy - Plutocracy within a Democracy
The greatest cure for pontificating about human culture is to go out and actually talk to people in their fulsome, maddening complexity. I promised an Enoughness Part 3 - to complement my earlier...
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A bluebird's saurian eye
Cherry leaves unfurl unblemished. A dark-armored bumble rumbles, aground in violets, A saurian eye of bluebird,chill obsidian, tracks it and waits for prey less massy and be-weaponed.
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May 1975 - Diary of a fourth-grader
Mom's poly sci notebook from college, Penn State circa 1960, repurposedI was clearing out some old boxes. Getting rid of stuff whose sentimental value had leached slowly away. Ribbons from the...
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More reminiscing - Tucson to San Diego
Once, when I was living in San Diego, some old friends were gathering in Tucson. This must have been at the beginning of the 90s, because there was a year or so there when I didn’t have a car. I...
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Gypsy moth infestations
a freshly hatched gypsy moth caterpillarGrowing up in Pennsylvania in the 1980s I saw years when the leaves came out on the trees in May and were gone by middle of June. From a distance, the rolling,...
View ArticleMy life experienced as a sequence of cars
In 1981, as soon as I was old enough, I took my driver’s test in a ‘64 sky blue Ford Falcon – a three-speed column shift. The sedan had belonged to my great aunt Ann, who never drove it much. I...
View ArticleLooking back at predictions for 2016
Ah.Let's whisper this blog back to life.I began a tradition of making January predictions - and looking back to see how inaccurate the past year's predictions were (which if nothing else disqualifies...
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Predictions for 2017
After proving on this blog once again that prediction can be a sucker's game, I finished up my wandering around central Florida (where I was interviewing people on their attitudes about voting and...
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Politics: The Bad, Not-So-Bad, and the Almost Good.
Moonstone Beach, Rhode IslandIt's now a month since Donald Trump was inaugurated into office. Yet so far, damage has been limited by the administration's inexperience, incompetence and political...
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Fallow garden
I didn't maintain a garden last year. I was doing a great deal of traveling for work, and so the crown vetch had its way with it. I could claim to be practicing the age old practice of leaving one's...
View ArticleTwo Thousand Seventeen in the rearview mirror.
It is a new(ish) year and it is time for the annual humiliation of seeing how badly I've predicted the future once again. Is prediction futility? Can one get better at it? Does it only work if you...
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Two Thousand Eighteen stretching out before us
At some point I came to realize that most of my life's trajectories had little to do with big, conscious decisions that I made, and much more to do with thousands of little micro-decisions. Choices...
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