Dec 3, 2024
Fans of the movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” will remember the scene. Ben Stein plays a famously boring high school teacher giving a lecture about economics to a room full of teenagers fighting to stay awake. In about a minute, he covers the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Laffer Curve, fundamental...
Nov 26, 2024
The late John Prine, in his 1971 classic song, “Illegal Smile,” wrote: “You may see me tonight, with an illegal smile. It don’t cost very much, but it lasts a long while.” The journey marijuana has traveled in American culture during my lifetime is a fascinating one. A quick review of the music written about...
Nov 19, 2024
I went to see a movie on Friday night. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I can walk to Living Room Theaters from my townhouse in ten minutes, and their popcorn is fantastic. There’s nothing strange about going, except it had been months since I had been there. Now I have been twice in a week.
Nov 12, 2024
There is no substitute for just showing up. Sometimes I wish there was one, but there just isn’t.
The relentless polling that exhausted Americans during the last three months of the presidential campaigns never really swung all that much, no matter what the drama of the day was. By the time Labor Day arrived, the...
Nov 7, 2024
Combine the adjectives of anger, fear and apathy to describe any audience, and it predictably equates to trouble. Those descriptors are the features of the American electorate today.
Imagine any organization of people, of any kind, that makes its decisions while grounded in those emotions. What could that collective...