Mar 20
This week’s Scientific American asks “Can U.S. Fracked Gas Save Ukraine?” The article points out that Ukraine depends on Russia for about two thirds of its natural gas, which gives Putin and his oligarchs a big hammer. So, naturally, the oligarchs in Washington are angling to replace Russian gas with American gas, if they can. …
Mar 18
Lethal but Legal by Nicholas Freudenberg (Oxford U. Press 2014) takes on one of the great paradoxes of our time: we have the scientific capacity to support healthier, longer life spans for the earth’s population, but in fact we see the spread of novel plagues more devastating than the medieval Black Death. In place of …
Mar 13
Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which opened at the Berkeley Rep this evening, is both the funniest and the most serious show I’ve ever seen at this theatre. The author is Italy’s famous Dario Fo — Nobel Prize for Literature, 1997 — and the setting is 1970 Milan, but the Rep has tweaked the script so …
Mar 08
To satisfy time after time, a salad needs to be complex. Even cows seek out variety, chomping on dandelions, daisies, and other bits of herbal spice to enrich their diet of plain old verdure. We humans can do so much more, especially if, like me, we live a few steps from the famous Monterey Market, …
Mar 05
Lots of sound and fury about Ukraine, with a pre-war atmosphere to it. Political posturing setting new heights of ridicule and hypocrisy. Tons of garbage in the press. Among the clearer, more rational voices is this piece from the Guardian by Seumas Milne: Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations …
Feb 20
While I’m in the mood to do product reviews, I have to give a shoutout to Scrivener. Created and maintained by the Literature & Latte group in the UK (literatureandlatte.com), Scrivener is the writing tool I have been looking for for years. They say that Shakespeare wrote his plays in one flow without corrections and …
Feb 20
As a lawyer I sometimes take depositions. The witness sits across the table from me, I ask them questions, the court reporter takes it all down. Typically, in a deposition you confront the witness with documents — emails or letters they’ve written, reports, charts, whatever matters in the lawsuit. Some cases involve thousands of pages, …
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