There’s an old belief that all little boys go dino-mad for a minute. I have no idea if that’s accurate, but I do know I was no exception. Back then, I recall a zoo of molded plastic critters, everything from the T-rex to the Stegosaurus. I remember junior paleontology books and a bemused father* taking me over and over and over to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science so that I could gawk at the fossils.  I love dinosaurs. I always have. Even now. I recently finished the very good book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black.** Odds are I’ll stop loving them right around the time... Read More

There are two incontrovertible facts: the first is that Louisa May Alcott was a fascinating human being. Her parents were Transcendentalists. She took lessons from Henry David Thoreau. She wrote a play for the Boston Theater and subsequently burned it due to infighting between her actors. Alcott briefly served as a nurse during the Civil War, survived typhoid fever, was a feminist, and was active in the abolitionist movement. To put it plainly, she was a baller. Oh, also? She wrote Little Women. That brings us to the second incontrovertible fact, which is that up until very recently, I was almost... Read More

Not long ago, I read the incredible book “Strangers in their Own Land,” by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. She visited Louisiana and interviewed scads of people to ask them about their voting habits. Specifically, she wanted to find out why these decent and smart people continually voted against their own interests. If you lived in a place like Louisiana, with gorgeous wetlands and lakes you could fish in and enjoy, why would you vote for people that would lift environmental regulations and pollute them at will? For many of them, they viewed it as a binary choice. You could... Read More