Articles
Written for submission to various publications.
On the New Nature of Reality
Imagine coming across this picture on the internet: A person is viciously hitting an old lady, who is leaning back on her walker for support, face horrified. A stream of blood flows from her nose while the perpetrator gleefully mugs…
Quarantine Cyberterrorism
A number of years ago, I was hired by an IT firm to help test their network defenses at a secure facility. I went on-site in plain clothes, sat in a public area, got on the public WiFi, and attempted…
Thirty Years in Florida
Exactly thirty years ago today, on my 21st birthday, I arrived in Naples, Florida. Around 11 am the 15th of May, 1989, I took my Spanish Literature final at LSU. When everyone was done, our small class walked together to…
Brevity
In Hamlet, Polonius begins a speech with, “Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.” Centuries later, an episode of the Simpsons (“Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington”) cleverly edits Shakespeare…
First, Mankind
Last Sunday, I saw “First Man”, a film about NASA’s run-up to the Apollo 11 moon landing. It’s told primarily through the eyes of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his family. I was just over a year old when the…
The Morality of Eating
After reading this article recommended by my brother Adam, we discussed whether all forms of eating are equally moral or immoral. Put another way, why do some consider eating a plant — a living thing — inherently more acceptable than eating…
F**k Anthony Bourdain
Everybody reading this is likely aware of Anthony Bourdain’s first book, Kitchen Confidential, in which he exposed some of the – pardon the pun – less savory aspects of the food prep world. In it, he discussed everything from how…
Monumental Cemetery of Milan
About 25 years ago, I started playing a computer game called “Civilization”, which was released by MicroProse, a company founded in part by a man named Sid Meier. Meier is a historian and musician as well as a computer programmer.…
A Jewish Soldier in WWII
On July 22, 1944, about seven weeks after the beaches of Normandy had been taken in D-Day, the 28th Infantry — the “Iron Division”, as World War One’s General Pershing named it — landed on that same beachhead. The men…
