Death of a Salesman was the story of Willy Loman, a doomed man in a dying profession. Playwright Arthur Miller wrote him as a man possessed by the desire to make a good living. What he sold was much less of a priority than what selling got him. As a result his way of life […]

Any dream featuring Adolph Hitler would be classified as a nightmare, but what would you call a dream featuring Adolph Hitler wearing a pig mask, interrogating you for some vital information only you have? That nightmare terrorizes Jennifer Doudna, a microbiologist at the University of California at Berkeley.  In her waking hours she played a […]

Going for my noon walk the other day, I approached a yard with two untethered dogs and no physical fence. “Do the owners use an invisible fence?,” I wondered (the kind of system that uses a shock collar to remind dogs of their boundaries).  As I walked by, these dogs barked at me and ran toward […]

If familiarity breeds contempt, how can some couples stay married 80 years or more? Zelmyra and Herbert Fisher, who broke The Guinness World Record for the longest marriage (84 years) in 2008, but lived to tack on three more, had some simple advice for anyone wishing to beat their record: “Remember marriage is not a contest, never […]

The place that hosted the first Pentecost was as much a source of confusion for the divided inhabitants of Jerusalem as the Tower of Babel was for the people described in the 11th chapter of Genesis who attempted to build a monument representing their perceived unity.  As Sunday’s first reading from Acts tells us, the different […]