I wish to thank Dr. Katherine Trebeck and Dr. Dirk Philipsen for their response to our lead essay. It is a pleasure to discuss important ideas with scholars who are searching for the truth and human betterment. Trebeck and Philipsen question “the human ability to invent itself out of the basic laws of physics” and call for “A Wellbeing Economy [that] positions the economy in service of human flourishing and true freedom; less precariousness and more dignity; fewer dirty industries and more businesses who put their workers and communities front and center.”
I agree that humanity still faces many problems, but I ask, along with the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.”[1] Below, I outline a number of ways in which the world has become a better place over the last few decades and propose that many people are already living in a Wellbeing Econ
Apr 13, 2021
A Girl Named Al and
Beat the Turtle Drum, died on April 7 at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Conn. She was 96.
Greene was born on October 24, 1924 in Manhattan, the second daughter of Mabel and Richard Clarke, both journalists. Mabel Clarke was the first movie critic for the
New York Daily News, the same newspaper where Richard Clarke served as managing editor.
Greene grew up in Larchmont, and upon graduating from Marymount School in Manhattan, she enrolled at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1942. But after two years of study, Greene left college in 1944, noting in her
Something About the Author autobiography that “what I craved, what I needed, was a taste of the real world. A job.” She landed one in the mailroom at the Associated Press in New York. She worked her way up from there, soon earning a position as a reporter for the AP’s city desk during WWII, where favorite assignments included interviewing Frank Sinatra and Marlene Di
Lolita for the first time. I do.
Freshman fall in college
. It was 1989 and I had just turned 18. I curled up under my Laura Ashley knockoff floral comforter and cracked
Lolita open for Professor Shepard’s English 101 class. The story moved swiftly. It was electrifying. I could not put it down. I did not question that it was Lolita who seduced Humbert first. I believed that Humbert loved her. I somehow did not catch most of her tears. Dare I admit “
Lo. Lee. Ta.” pinged me with romantic longing? Professor Shepard was young, mustached and uproariously funny. His recitation in class of Humbert Humbert’s lines in cartoonish voices made us belly laugh at the outrageousness of this loser’s confessions, many of which we had missed in our own readings. And in this way the scariness of what H.H. was confessing to lost some of its power. Shepard played Humbert like Groucho Marx might do Dracula. In an exaggerated voice he deftly dropped in the games Humbert was playing as narra