ParisTampaBlog

Now I’ve never forgotten what President Reagan’s said while visiting Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. His words on that occasion, were, as many of you also will remember, “MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL” Now lately I’ve been reading with great enjoyment and appreciation the Western writer, Louis Lamour. (He would prefer, of [...]

Peoples, countries, states are often asking themselves, “What is to be done?” Certainly since the time of Vladimir Lenin’s question, Что делать, and probably long before. If the problems are acute enough (or the leaders of the revolt unscrupulous enough) the answer is/may be revolution, as in French, Russian, and earlier English (1649 and 1688). [...]

On his New York Review Blog  the poet Charles Simic writes, “My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, [...]

I take the following from the Harvard Magazine of Januaary-February, 2012. My “pick” of Fred Shapiro’s pick of  choice Harvard words: We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. —Louis D. Brandeis, LL.B. 1877, quoted in Labor, October 14, 1941 There may [...]

Read this today in a Times op-ed piece by Brian Greene, Waiting for the Higgs Particle: “Higgs thus suggested a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness, filling otherwise empty space with a substance capable of bestowing upon particles their mass.” Haven’t we heard something like this before? —Wasn’t it the carpenter Joseph’s son who [...]