A life in words

  • Five Albums from Years Ending In Five

    Five Albums from Years Ending In Five

    For recent birthdays I’ve been selecting albums to represent years in my life. In the first installment, it was 1983, 1993, 2003, 2013, and 2023. The next installment, we incremented a year, so: 1984, 1994, 2004, etc. For this year, it was 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and 2024/2025 (an album released since my last birthday.)…

  • City water caused my acid reflux; filtering eliminates it

    City water caused my acid reflux; filtering eliminates it

    For over a decade I’ve had on-and-off heartburn. But mostly it was no big deal—just one of those discontents of modernity—until a few years ago, when out of nowhere I started to have acid reflux. Not just any acid reflux—it was nasty. I’d wake up with pains shooting through my entire body. Or not be…

  • Harris and class

    First I’ll mention race: Harris’s ancestry is so mixed that in a sense it’s an error to assign her to any one of the traditional (and arbitrary) racial categories. She truly is a product of globalization of the gene pool, and is a taste of the inevitable future when Americans broadly have ancestors from all…

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech … Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. … A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their freedom of speech. … Freedom of speech is ever the symptom, as well as the effect of a good government. … Guilt only dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its lurking holes, and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight.Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood no. 8, 1722 (orthography and spelling modernized)