I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a...
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would af...
Invariably, knowledge dictates life, liberty, and death, but those who have historically occupied the seats of power not only dictate what is defined as knowledge but also dictate what’s included, what’s excluded, and how it is filtered to societ...
The murder of my husband by the railways has altered the way I think about everything. I had always thought that the majority of people were decent and honourable. In the wake of the crash, what made me angry more than anything else was the realisati...
I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got ple...
Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to hel...
I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card, and I heard from a physicist at a major research un...
I like my house to be unique to me. Sure, I've bought plenty of things out of a catalog, but the way I put them together in my home is special. You might have bought your sofa at a major home decorating store, but the rug you found at the flea market...
America has the highest standard of living of any major country in the entire world. To maintain and enhance that standard of living, America should continue to embrace those qualities which have made America great: openness and dynamism. Openness to...
Back in Romania, always I was struggling to compete with Vladislav Rastorotsky, the great Russian coach of Lyudmila Turishcheva. He was a powerful coach, internationally. I took him like the major challenge of my life, and pretty soon I'm beating him...
Most of the time I liked school and got good grades. In junior high, though, I hit a stumbling block with math - I used to come home and cry because of how frustrated I was! But after a few good teachers and a lot of perseverance, I ended up loving m...
I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's no...
We'd all survive if Twitter shut down for a short while during major riots. Social media isn't any more important than a train station, a road or a bus service. We don't worry about police temporarily closing those. Common sense. If riot info and fea...
You spend too much time on ephemeras. The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is merely new is the most transitory of all thi...
Empathy is a big part of Sparkleponies, because it’s also my belief (as a history and political science major) that societies that don’t practice rational empathy inevitably collapse – either by fomenting conflict from within by oppressing a se...
I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard -...
I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle commun...
Jamie Moyer was in his third year as a major league pitcher and was, by his own admission, still wide-eyed, watching everything going on around him and soaking it in. He paid particular attention to older teammates on his Chicago Cubs squad, hoping t...
Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie ge...
In the United States in 2009, more than 10.2 billion trips were taken on transit trains and buses. So far, the nation has not experienced a major transit attack since Sept. 11, but the March 2010 Moscow subway bombings and earlier train attacks in Lo...
My daughter just graduated college and she's a dance major. She's done a couple of dance videos already and won Miss Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. She's going out for Miss United States the second week of July, out in Las Vegas. She will proba...
