Dr. James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, has written that the human brain is “the most complex thing we have yet discovered in the universe.” Indeed, with its 100 billion cells, the human brain is a universe within a skull. This isn’t an original insight: The importance of the brain was understood for...
Vaclav Havel has said that we are undergoing “the brutal destruction of a cultural landscape that has taken centuries to develop”; within this decaying global civilization “is in essence the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.” This use of the word “civilization” is a contradiction in terms, since the new moral and intellectual...
The book cannot be closed on World War II until the American and British people know the full story of the crimes their governments committed against anticommunist Russians, Yugoslavs, and others who desperately wanted to avoid Soviet terror and who, nevertheless, were turned over to Stalin’s killer squads—all in violation of American and British traditions...
The halls and vast columned spaces of the St. Scholastica convent in Atchison, Kansas, are dark and empty now. The sisters who filled these buildings with busy religious life for several generations are dead or departed into the secular world with the virtual demise of convent life as a result of Vatican II. I talk...
On the morning of July 13, 1985, as I noted in my journal, I woke with an exceptionally clear recollection of a dream. In it my wife, Elizabeth, and I were in a high-ceilinged Victorian room with brown walls fashioned of rotating metallic discs. From there, we moved outside onto New York City’s Park Avenue,...
Transnationalism isn’t a term that is familiar to the American people. According to Peter Drucker, a leading advocate of transnationalism, a transnational company is one that operates in the global marketplace; that does its research wherever there are scientists and technicians, and manufactures where economics dictate (in many countries, that is); and that has a...
World War II seems both near and far away. In one sense, it seems like only yesterday that I was 17 years old, in uniform, and in Georgia and California. In another sense, that period is ancient history. We have traversed a century or more in human experience since the early 1940’s. The conflict was...
The significance of the past—the past of a minute or an hour ago, 100 years ago, or 5,000 years ago—is of consuming interest to me; many writers are concerned with the effects of time on people and institutions. The past provides writers with most of their raw material. Proust had only to taste a sweet,...