Benjamin Franklin is one of the most popular and highly regarded of the country’s “founding fathers.”  His life story has been told in any number of biographies (most notably H.W. Brands’ “The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin” (2000) and Walter Isaacson’s “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” (2003)).  But little is commonly […]

In Arthur C. Clarke’s “3001: The Final Odyssey,” the human population lives in ring-shaped “habitats” in a geostationary orbit around the planet.  Earth’s surface, in Clarke’s futuristic vision, is essentially uninhabitable, the air being too foul and the land too barren to sustain the species. When I first envisioned life in that next millennial scenario, […]

Don’t look now but the election of the next president is just one year and a few days away.  A year from now the final polls will be taken, and the results will soon thereafter be announced.  Prognosticating in politics is always the task of a fool, but I’ve been called that and worse any […]

Henrik Ibsen caused a major stir in dramatic theater in 1879 with the premiere of his “A Doll’s House.”  The play’s ending was so vehemently rejected by some of its early audiences that Ibsen penned an alternate, less depressing, ending that he later came to abhor. In the current adaptation of the play at Capital […]