Meditations

A group of more than a dozen young people entered the Grand Canyon on rafts before the pandemic struck the United States. Three weeks without contact with the outside world,…

Just after I took my seat in front of the small bamboo forest at the Tree Farm, a 30-something fellow stopped and spoke. Excited to have discovered the place after…

As I’ve noted before, there is something metaphysically strange about this global pandemic. It’s like we’re living in a slow-motion version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” with the…

Fittingly, a Filipino fellow, googling the word “precipice,” came upon my column, “At the Precipice, We Change?” It was written almost a year ago. Writers will recognize the sensation of…

In my case the adage, “you can’t go home again” is literally true. However not long before my 93-year-old father died, I asked him who would carry Michigan in 2016,…

Admittedly, I’ve inveighed against a number of superficial, second-rate and wrongheaded philosophical pieces in the New York Times [Philosopher’s] “Stone” series. So it’s only fair and fitting that when I…

Recently I heard an eminent astronomer proclaim: “The universe doesn’t care if we exist, and it won’t care if we go away.” If you’ve spent any time alone in the…

Philosophers tend not to argue about their views, either in the quarrelsome or the lawyerly sense of the word. We strive, and usually succeed, at giving each other “a fair…