For reading between the lines with greater comprehension
Giving advice is risky business. You lose friends. You get accused of being bossy, nosey, a know-it-all, controlling. It can invite reciprocation, and, if like many of us you are better at dishing out advice than taking it in, that’s no fun. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Fortunately, some rhetorical tricks can make […]
“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland* Minding one’s own business commonly means not minding other people’s business, but its literal meaning is still implied–don’t mind others’ business because you have business of […]
Recently, I was listening to an NPR report on Jimmy Carter’s meeting with leaders of the Palestinian militant Hamas party. The reporter had two experts on to debate the merits of Carter’s action. One argued that Carter sent the wrong message. Diplomatic engagement only encourages Hamas leaders to stand irrationally firm. The other said Carter […]
Loosely speaking, time is like zipping up a very long zipper. The future is open; the past is closed. The present is like the zipslide closing up possibilities. While we may not be able to determine what happened in the past, the past is nonetheless determined. The future is not. It’s unknowably open. There is […]
Three weeks ago I recounted a lot of tough problems raised over the ages about how cause and effect really work. One of the toughest was that if cause and effect works like we normally think it does-thing A bumps into thing B and moves it in a precisely predictable direction, then the whole universe […]
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