“Advertising is legalized lying.” – H.G. Wells
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“I just finished reading your book You’re Stronger than You Think and felt compelled to write you. I found it tremendously enriching from both a personal and professional point of view.”
That was the opening sentence from a recent e-mail I received from a complete stranger. Truth be told, it is impossible to get too many e-mails like this!
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In a recent edition of the New Yorker, the magazine published a story by Dashiell Hammett and one of the paragraphs in that wonderful story nicely captures the way that waiting for something bad to happen can be worse than experiencing that bad thing. In the scene, a group of people stand on the sidewalk…
In another great New Yorker article, Lauren Collins writes about controversy over taxing wealthy people in France, a controversy that has already caused Gerard Depardieu to move to Belgium and/or Russia. At one point in the article, she interviews experts to get their views on whether such taxes are effective in raising revenue. One expert…
Most of us have at least one cranky old relative who not only has stronger opinions than the rest of us, but is also convinced that those opinions are superior to ours. Not just content to believe that, say, voter ID laws are a good idea, this relative is also derisive of anyone with a…
The New Yorker recently published a very nice article on Pope Francis. At one point in the article, the Pope explains why he is trying to deemphasize all the controversies that have taken up so much of the Church’s attention in recent years, controversies about birth control, abortion and the like. His explanation shows a respectable…
In the book review section of the New York Times, Andrew Solomon poses a reflection on Adam Lanza, the deranged elementary school shooter in Connecticut: “If we want to stem violence, we need to begin by stemming despair.” How we will stem either of these problems I don’t know. But what a great sentence!