Last week my niece earned a masters degree, so The Fabulous Wife and I flew to Arizona to attend her graduation. We were honored to be there. Her two-year program gave her marketable skills, but more importantly, it completed her transformation into an adult. That word — adult — is…

Three years late, I’ve decided to wade into the controversy over the New York Times’s 1619 Project, whose goal is to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.” Sometimes it takes…

This week marks four years since I retired from UC Berkeley. Every time I reflect on it I experience that paradoxical sense of time: it feels as if I left ages ago — and just yesterday. I still think about work occasionally, and not just when UC Berkeley’s in the…

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its latest report on our planetary ecosystem. It’s as bad as you think. In short, global net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 were 12% higher than in 2010 and 54% higher than in 1990. Even if the nations attending…

I’ve mentioned more than once that while I’m content with my own life, I despair for the future. It seems I’m not alone. According to longtime pollster Gallup, whose political surveys receive a B+ grade from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, as of January 2022, 85% of Americans are satisfied with their…

Let’s assume the onslaught in Ukraine continues. Through sheer force of numbers, the Russians will eventually succeed. They will capture or kill Zelensky and his government. They will overrun the cities. They will shut the borders with the West. And they will drop an iron curtain over the media so…

Taking a break from the bad news elsewhere . . . Berkeley’s making national headlines again. The state courts have ordered the University of California, whose campus occupies 600 acres in the heart of town and another 600 in the hills, to reduce next fall’s incoming class by nearly three…

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is intelligent but not smart. Unable to control his ambition, he embarks on a murderously selfish path that unites opposition against him. Late in the play (Act 3, Scene 4) he realizes his plans are unlikely to succeed. Should he change course? No. “I am in blood stepped…

Carlo Cipolla, author of The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, one of my foundational documents, laments that “whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the…