Monthly Archives: August 2016

THINKING ABOUT NATURAL VS. HUMAN ISSUES

Life on Cape Cod is seasoned with all the news stories involving what can be characterized—perhaps misleadingly–as conflicts between natural and human interests. You could devote a whole section of the newspaper to them, along with sports, business, and food. On the one hand it’s pretty cool that great white sharks are taking an interest […]

IMAGINING A WORLD HEALING SUMMIT

After Nice, it’s not just assault weapons we ought to ban, but trucks. It’s tempting to declare it official: the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. I doubt that would hold up statistically—see Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” But it sure seems like it. Seems like every morning […]

The appeal of the sheepdog option.

I find myself (as Commander-in-Chief of this space every two weeks) trying to come up with something useful to say about the gun issue. Ever since reading the statistics showing that countries with low per capita gun ownership have much lower rates of homicides by guns, my take on guns, like that of most people […]