November 10, 2019
In April 1961, John F. Kennedy had a really unpleasant – but enlightening – experience. The invasion of Cuba by a force of exiles from that unhappy island, which had been hatched and supported by the government of the United States, met disaster at a place called the Bay of Pigs. The event was a…
November 3, 2019
I was in a meeting the other day with Jackie Reed, the super-sharp CEO of TS Restaurants (Duke’s Waikiki, Jake’s Del Mar, et al) and she pointed out the trap hidden within the apparent safety of checklists. “When people rely on checklists,” she observed, “they can have a tendency to stop thinking…as if completing the…
October 24, 2019
I turned 75 back in May. Three quarters of a century on this planet should prompt one to do some reflecting and it had that effect on me. I remember the first time I could call up memories from 20 years prior. I was 30 at the time and bemused by the fact that I…
June 8, 2019
The Overton Window is an interesting – and timely – idea. It defines the acceptable limits of public discourse. For example, in an election campaign like the one already picking up momentum for 2020, politicians will be pushed – so the theory goes – to stay within Overton’s “window,” the permissible domain of conversation. Ideas…
December 24, 2018
In this most consumption-drenched season of all – what the west and, particularly, America – has made of a day commemorating the birth of Christ, it may not be too terrible a crime to remember some of those little gifts that have a way of lingering in the mind long after the day itself and…
November 21, 2018
(I will be posting some speculative pieces over the next few months. They’ll be titled “Musings” to set them apart from my other posts. Hope you enjoy!) One of the hardest things for anyone to do is to step outside of their normal frame of reference. We get used to seeing the world the way…
October 28, 2018
The picture in my mind’s eye now is of a summer evening when the trees were full of leaves and the sun was still high at seven o’clock but at an angle that threw shadows and tinted the light in a way that made it seem golden and streaked with some darker, richer hue. It…
October 15, 2018
History is made by the best of us and the worst of us over the heads of the rest of us. Philosopher longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, was the author of the above quote, which struck me the first time I read it. It does seem that that is the way the world truly works. Good people…
October 2, 2018
Sometimes a really bad idea can gain a foothold in a large population and spread like a virus. Over the centuries, there have been many: the eerie threat of witchcraft, the deep danger of religious heresy, the revealed presence of secret Communists in the U.S. State Department. These widely shared psychoses are dangerous and often…
September 16, 2018
We were a rag-tag group of athletes on an all-male campus without a football team and thirsting for contact… of multiple kinds. Rugby proved to be part of the answer. Our beloved Coach, Dr. John Kenyon, was the major inspiration for the program. He was a wild and wooly Scotsman who taught Experimental Psychology and…
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