Edward Gibbon Most of you will have heard of Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , a historical oeuvre whi...

  “Just wait till 2028 and things will go right back to how they were.”

 

  ...as we walk along the Alcoa (our local river) through the city park of Alcobaça, our town.

This is a chat by Michael with GPT 3.5---unblemished, unedited; even the emojis are authentic: Could you put the following sentence into anc...

  The Worst Part of Pete Hegseth’s Group Chat Debacle And why the careless secretary of defense should resign. March 25, 2025 By  Davi...

We had a storm during the night, and the atmosphere is still quite unsettled. Moist air blowing in from the sea hits the serra, is pushed up...

We hadn't when we tripped  over an article in the New York Times titled A new scientific field is recasting who we are and how we got th...

 From Krugman's Substack account: Like many other Americans at the time, I spent the afternoon of the bicentennial — July 4, 1976 — at a...

You may know this already. This is---in a minor sense at least---the end of the world. You may recall this 20 years from now---if you are st...

 This is a screen shot of an internet page of the New York Times of today (Feb 27, 2025): A great read? "Great Read"(!). Would tha...

So, here is our review of  Call Me by Your Name--- André Aciman's   book (from 2007), not the new movie made from it in 2017. Title...

We're (again) working on a review of "Call Me by Your Name," --- the novel of André Aciman from 2007, which was made ten years...

  ..."Schrödinger's dumpster." (Got it? Hint: "Schrödinger's cat")

Underneath you find a review by the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark  of  Angela Merkel's autobiography (Merkel, the emeritus Germa...

Of Elon Musk, of course---the most hated man on the planet.  And who is defending him? A senator Kennedy---John Kennedy---who's not part...

Developmental Milestones of Your Elon Musk By Cora Frazier, February 3, 2025 The way your Elon Musk plays, moves, and communicates offers ...

We've been quiet for quite a while, for different reasons, but here we are again---and with a controversial subject, as usual: The 199 M...

    We have been at this for a while.  Here, for example, in a blog post from 2011:   "Let me explain." That was the post , ...