Three Books That Changed My Life
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book – Thoreau, Walden It usually begins with Ayn Rand. I was an aimless and unhappy college freshman at UC San Diego when…
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book – Thoreau, Walden It usually begins with Ayn Rand. I was an aimless and unhappy college freshman at UC San Diego when…
We live in what I have come to term “the culture of nihilism”. It is a culture characterized by self absorption, selfishness, lack of concern for others, incivility, rudeness and nastiness. Nietzsche prophesied it almost 150 years ago and his…
In the rush of life that is the modern world, dominated as it by economic concerns and the quest for more and better things, the social values that make life worth living have been lost. I speak here of civility,…
This evening I was straddling two lanes at a red light as I had pulled out from a gas station at an intersection without enough space to get cleanly into the left lane. Apparently the driver behind me was incensed…
In “Economic Utopia And Spiritual Nihilism”, I tried to describe the my view of the culture. In short, I argued that the United States is a culture devoted almost entirely to economic efficiency and devoid of spiritual values. The paradoxical…
Man does not live by bread alone – Matthew 4:4 The Bible says that man does live by bread alone. The cultural commentator Michael Novak once amended this as follows: Man does live by bread alone – but he needs…
Painting: The Romans In Their Decadence (1847), Thomas Couture One of the greatest works in contemporary political philosophy is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History And The Last Man (1992). In it Fukuyama argues that the tendency of history is…
I just finished Irv and Marilyn Yalom’s book A Matter of Death and Life (2021) about Marilyn’s death from cancer and Dr. Yalom’s struggle to continue on after. In alternating chapters, Irv and Marilyn write about her decline until death…
[Most people] couldn’t see what he had done, and was still prepared to do, to turn his dreams and compulsions into something lasting, into the existential mortar and stone of an unforgettable life – Mike Sielski, The Rise: Kobe Bryant…
2021 was a year that will be long-remembered for retail investors’ flash-mobbing of “meme stocks” thanks to social media sites like Reddit and online trading platforms like Robinhood. The rocket ship emojis and popular trends that included trading in non-fungible…