Today’s fact is that Just as perfection can be the enemy of the good, hyperintelligent writing can cripple the storytelling approach of good fiction. You’re doomed if you think too much. My father had a girlfriend at one time — Polish, very nice, not too bright up there, if you know what I mean, big […]

Today’s fact is that Fortune Favors the Bold. This means that you get luckier, the more audacious and daring you are in your life. Some men take chances. Most men do not. The former group is going to have better luck with their lives than the latter one. It’s gonna leave the cowards in the […]

“The only thing missing from the vast majority of movies made in the past 100 years is the Idea. A Shakespearean play, even one that was sensationalist, was full of ideas and concepts; it reveled in the thinking man. Hollywood has missed the boat when it comes to presenting ideas. There are no deeper thoughts […]

The multiverse may be real. There may be an infinite, or near-infinite, number of parallel universes out there, some of which contain multiple versions of ourselves, living in different cities, crippled or well, happy or miserable, depending on what fate decrees. There is a theory in modern physics which states that the logical end result […]

The Christian Church used to have a concept of the “just profit” a merchant could take in. He was supposed to have enough to make new investments and to collect a little for his own use, but no more. The Church, while it did not ban interest payments as Islam did, was always a little […]

“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.” — Lao Tzu If you tried to perfect a better formula for governance and society than the United States in today’s world, you couldn’t do it. The U.S. is the perfect mix of civil society and freedom-in-the-ranks; it achieves the near-impossible with effortless grace. Even in […]

Pain is an inescapable feature of life. There will be pain, emotional and physical, at various times in our lives; how we deal with it determines our general level of happiness and our views of the positivity (or negativity) of the universe. The first thing to realize is that, for most people, pain passes. It […]

be interesting This is probably the number-one takeaway from the whole political affair. We live in the age of Entertainment. Trump has been interesting from the get-go. In the 2016 primaries, he was amusing when he talked of Marco Rubio sweating like a pig, and he shook a water bottle to demonstrate. In 2016, he […]

The nuclear missiles were falling. From east and west, north and south, they came: steel-tipped, plutonium-cargoed beasts from another time and place, seeking universal destruction. Rob Radford sat in his home in the suburbs of a minor American city, working on last-minute modifcations to his life raft. It was a wooden canoe-shaped vessel parked in […]

Every public figure has an image. Sometimes the image is very good, like Stephen King’s image, and sometimes the image is very bad, like Adolf Hitler’s image. The image, whatever its approval rating, is a combination of a real basis and an illusory patina sprinkled upon it. Let’s talk about what makes a good image. […]