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In Purgatory, there probably aren’t any garbage disposals. People there will have to scrape all food remains into the trash, and if so much as an onion bit gets into the drain, it will have to be carefully fished out before the water is turned on, lest the drain clog. And also it will be as in many cities on the East and West coast: the garbage

Somehow people doubt that this is true, but it is a fact: I was a professional chef with a highly regarded firm that served exotic meats such as elephant, giraffe, snake. So who better to take advantage of the remarkable new availability of exotic meats online ? True, there is a challenge here. I’ve never made Yak, Boar, Elk, or Kangaroo. But the

I know it’s not Father’s Day but I can’t help thinking about him anyway. He was really crazy in a wonderful sort of way. Where to start? Oh, let’s talk about money. For years he directed music at our family’s church. He was outstanding. He was a composer too. He once wrote a full-blown cantata about the history of this particular church, complete

  Dealing with personal failure is one of the great struggles of growing up. When we are young, the possibilities seem without limit, but as the years pass, we face every manner of barrier that causes us to be all too aware that we face a world with many constraints, many of them due to the limits of the temporal world but also, we must admit,

Part of the difficulty of understanding Mark Twain’s political outlook is due to terminology and the tendency of politics to corrupt the meaning of everything. As often as you see him called a liberal, he is called a conservative, and sometimes both in the same breath. Critics puzzle about how one person could be champion of workers, owners, and

The debate between J.M. Keynes and F.A. Hayek, both living and teaching in Britain in the 1930s , was one of the great debates of the century. Sadly, the charming globetrotter Keynes had the podium and the audience, to the point of influencing policy the world over even to the present day. Meanwhile, the quiet and studious Hayek never really did

  It has been ten years since my office was last cleaned. It was like opening a time capsule — and not just because what I found was old. What I found represented a different epoch, a time when all things that mattered were subject to the law of scarcity: what one had no one else could have and therefore it was treasured and hoarded for all

  Since at least the 12th century until very recently, entry into a profession has come via an apprenticeship, or, in the American terminology, a formal internship. A young person comes to work with people experienced in a trade, usually in exchange for office space, housing, tools to use, but little or no monetary compensation. Everyone wins: the

I’m on a Sunday walk and a nice boy tries to sell me lemonade. A budding entrepreneur! Still, I decline. So he strengthens his pitch: “I’m donating the profits to stop child abuse.” Still I decline, and more easily now that he has linked his praiseworthy commercial venture with a big social pathology that a 12-year-old boy can’t possibly solve —

Checking out at the grocery store the other day, I paid for my sack of rolls. The checkout person handed me my bag. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” she replied. I walked away with a sense that something was wrong. Do checkout people usually say, “you’re welcome” and nothing else? Not usually. Usually they say, “thank you,” same as the