Okay, let me come around in a circle here.  And don’t think I don’t know that there are at least a couple of people who read this blog who tell me they’re socialists, and who could make a better case here than I can. But–let’s get to it.  It’s Saturday. Robert says that socialism isn’t…

Actually, what we had yesterday in Connecticut was a whole series of thunderstorms that rolled through the state and seem to have pretty much trashed the city of Bridgeport, maybe via a small tornado.  It’s hard to tell, but there are branches all over my yard this morning and Bridgeport made Fox News.  They’ve declared…

Let me start this off by saying that there are entire days during the summer when I have to do nothing but sit around and remind myself that I don’t REALLY hate pollen. Today is one of those days.  My head hurts.  Everything itches.  It was miserably hot when I ran out to the grocery…

This is going to be an interesting day.  The pollen count must be up in the stratosphere somewhere–did I just spell that wrong?–and I keep sneezing like I’m a character in an early Disney movie.  I managed to get the writing done for today, but I think I know another reason why I don’t usually…

Okay.  I sat around looking at the comments on yesterdays post this morning, and I was struck, again, by that thing I’m obsessed with–we have as much a need for intellectual history as we do for the history of events. Let me start with one thing:  there’s a lot about the Texas curriculum standards what…

The real problem that comes with waking up too early is not the tiredness that comes at the end of the day, but the distractedness that starts at the beginning and never stops.  I get my work done, but after that my brain seems to just float over the landscape without being able to settle…

This was going to be a very different post. I was calling it something like “The Meaning of Life,” or whatever, and blithering on about what the meaning of “meaning” is. Bu in order to do it, I went to the website fo the Council for Secular Humanism to see if the link to the…

Every once in a while, I go through these little fits of needing to Google things right and left, and this past week I have been looking for Medieval Art from Italy. In a way this is not surprising–I’m reading Dante’s Paradiso, and that’s Medieval literature from Italy, so it makes a certain amount of…

Some mornings, I get up, get my tea, do my work–and then feel sort of all over the place.  It isn’t that I’m finding it hard to concentrate.  It’s that all the functions of my brain feel like they’re being flown on a kite.  That probably doesn’t make any sense. And  I don’t really know…

I know, I know. I keep saying I want to talk about Lorenzo de Medici. And I do.  I still think of him as one of the most fascinating people who have ever lived, if only because he embodies–in his person–the fundamental contradictions of culture and education with human nature. But something else has come…