Posts by pwsadmin

We live in a post-reality world now, one that allows for truth to be whatever the loudest voice says it is. Obviously, this isn’t true for all of us, or even for the majority of us, but it’s true for a sizable minority. A basketball star says that the earth is flat and because he…

Happily Ever After – This is how most children’s books end – and they lived happily ever after. What a cruel punishment! To live happily ever after is to live in ignorance of the state of the world, to be unaware of the problems people have created for each other since the dawn of our…

I got a garden seal the other day. I’d been looking forward to it for quite some time, having ordered it months ago, and it finally came, shipped by FedEx and left on my front stoop, blocking the door. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when I opened the crate, sure enough, there it…

I realize it’s ironic to write an article about why no one reads anymore, but I’m doing it anyway. And I’m not saying no one reads anymore. Obviously, people do. In fact, some people read as much as they ever have, consuming multiple books per week, gorging themselves on the tasty offerings of Shakespeare, Jane…

Many people won’t read science fiction. They have the idea that it’s all warp drives and space battles and bizarre aliens and they just don’t want to read that. It’s too far out for their taste. But not all science fiction is that way. Look at Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is more properly…

We want to know things with certainty. We want to be able to classify actions and things and people into categories we can place in mental files, sorted into neat folders that we can retrieve when necessary. We dislike doubt. Our entire existence is given up to learning. We go to school as children, eager…

I’ve long loved the science fiction classics, like Dune, Foundation, Rendezvous with Rama and Fahrenheit 451. But I didn’t start out writing science fiction. I began with fantasies, westerns, mysteries, thrillers and literary fiction, none of which I published. I’ve also written legal books, newsletters and articles for many years. Those pay the bills but…

Joyce Kilmer famously wrote: “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” And despite many criticisms of both poem and poet, it remains to this day one of the best-known pieces of poetry. People who know nothing else about poetry can often recite at least that line if not the…

In the preamble it is written that “We the People” establish the Constitution to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to “ourselves and our Posterity.” Pretty words. And yet we fail to heed them. One of the most important concerns of…

Do we all deserve to be listened to equally? Or do some of us deserve more heft? In a perfect world, where everyone gave equal thought to every issue, where worries about universal health care took up the same amount of mental space in each person’s mind, where concerns about despoiling the planet consumed as…