Monthly Archives: June 2015

Assisted suicide: a creative response to the ending of life

The Death With Dignity ballot measure narrowly defeated statewide in 2012 actually passed on Cape Cod, with our aging population, suggesting that if the question were left up to those to whom it seems most relevant, the aging themselves, it would pass easily. The debate seems to come down to the interests of the living […]

June 24, 2015 – 6:35 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Computers and the CWQ

Has the computer improved writing? It certainly has increased the number of books published as well as the number of authors (both numbering these days in hundreds of thousands to over a million a year, depending on the estimate and exactly what is being estimated). Computers have made publishing so easy and inexpensive as to […]

June 18, 2015 – 3:21 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The other side of graduation hoopla

We are once again in the late spring graduation season featuring much upbeat newspaper coverage of inspirational speechifying and partying. But this self-congratulatory mood flies in the face of certain realities about the role of education in our society. Of the truths we hold self-evident, that formal education, the more the merrier, is one of […]

June 15, 2015 – 1:52 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Death’s bad reputation.

Death has a very bad reputation in our culture. That sounds like a black humor joke since its badness seems not a matter of reputation at all but inherent in the phenomenon. But to a significant extent, death, or our experience of it, is indeed a social disease: how it is characterized is a large […]

June 5, 2015 – 1:35 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)