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4/29/14

The Apollo of Gaza

You are a fisherman, name of Jouda Ghurab, on the Gaza Strip and earn give or take seven dollars a day selling what you catch with a net. In August 2013 you dive into the waters off the strip, looking for sardines, squid, and bream, when you see something. What you see will turn out to have great international implications and will involve Hamas, charged by Israel as a terrorist group.

4/22/14

Richard Halliburton at Nineteen and for the Rest of His Brief Life

He was the popular icon of an era, the handsome, debonair Princeton man, the admirer of Rupert Brooke and Lord Byron.  He found adventure and exotic lands while others slaved for the dollar.  He fulfilled his dream and his fame spread.  Today, his books are still found in libraries—pages brown and tattered, perhaps—but they remain on shelves.

4/15/14

Ramana Maharshi, The Early Years: Gabriele Ebert's Biography

Carl Sagan was humbled by the vastness of the universe and in his Cosmos series he reminded us repeatedly that the universe is not about us, dust motes dancing for a moment before falling away.  Unlike Sagan, Ramana Maharshi told us that we are here to stay, but not as we think we are. Like Sagan, Ramana saw the human ego as a bit of ephemera but, unlike Sagan, not as something alive. That, Maharshi might have said, is not bad news, but good news.

4/8/14

Real Men, Social Cooperation, and the Gap In Jack London's Thinking

Jack London was a brilliant man, brilliant but uneducated.  Although a fiction writer, his own life had more experience in it than many a  rousing novel.

4/1/14