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Over the holiday I took my family on a road trip. Like most drivers trying to make time, we took the Interstate for the most part. Then somewhere around Barstow, CA we got off the highway and drove old Route 66. Route 66 ran from Chicago to L.A. and took millions of Americans east and (mostly) west from the 1920s until the 1970s. One of the first American...
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Last year I began using Twitter with the impression that it made content shorter, more digestible. Then tech venture capitalist/bon vivant Marc Andreessen invented the tweetstorm. Andreessen's multipart Twitter rants - sequencing each tweet with 1/ 2/ 3/ and so on - inundate his 450k+ followers several times each day and inspire tweetstorms from others which Andreessen gladly retweets in order. All of which raise a fundamental question: can't Andreessen afford a blog?
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One of my favorite old Saturday Night Live characters is Don Novello's Father Guido Sarducci, the chain-smoking priest. While his Find the Pope in the Pizza skit was genius, his best was the Five-Minute University.
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Alexander Hamilton: Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, Sir?
I heard your name at Princeton, I was seeking an accelerated course of study
When I got sort of out of sorts with a buddy of yours
I may have punched him
It's a blur, sir
He handles the financials...
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As it relates to goings on in higher education, Ben Carson's take on amateurs vs. professionals is my favorite snapshot from the campaign so far. Before I explain, please allow me a brief digression to present the rest of my top five. You won't be surprised to find Dr. Carson photobombing...
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A few weeks ago I learned that my 96-year-old grandfather is charging his octogenarian roommate $5 per week to read his used newspaper. This was upsetting. Yes, the paper is The Globe & Mail, surely Canada's finest newspaper. And yes, he's only charging Canadian dollars. But I wondered whether a life of profligacy had reduced my grandfather to a state of penury requiring him to...
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Most people understand "salad days" as the greatest days of one's youth. The phrase was coined by Shakespeare and first appeared in the tragedy Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra, regretting her fling with Julius Caesar, says...
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I attended law school when cable television exploded from 50 channels to 500. As law school was pass/fail, we had a lot of time to keep an eye on the new niche channels appearing seemingly weekly. My roommate Dave and I began keeping a list of new channels we half expected...
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Few things are more upsetting than when a hero turns out to be a villain. Growing up in Canada, we were used to winning all kinds of medals in the Winter Olympics but forever coming up dry in the Summer Games. Canada set a dubious record at the 1976 Montreal Olympics when it became the only host country to fail to win a gold medal. So ahead of the 1988 Games in Seoul, when quiet Ben Johnson emerged as...
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The summer is over, thank goodness. Although this may be heresy to beachgoers and people like me who enjoy the opportunity to wear white between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it has become gospel for political panjandrums. At the end of August I wrote about Donald Trump, whose appeal to the worst in human nature may be exceeded only by a handful of historical figures. But nature abhors a vacuum, and Trump has ably filled the...
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