Author Archives: mkevane

A mysterious plague has manifested in the world’s starfish population, quickly spreading to several regions in which starfish (also called “sea stars”) are found. Starfish afflicted with the disease tear themselves to pieces, the arms crawling in opposite directions until … Continue reading →

In the morning Thursday, we woke up and the wife of the house made us an “aguatia.” Ok, this does not mean a small glass of juice, tea, or water; this means an entire huge meal. So we ate first … Continue reading →

The subject of comic-related-films or film-related-comics had understandably arisen and, when asked, I had ventured my honest opinion that I found something worrying about the fact that the superhero film audience was now almost entirely composed of adults, men and … Continue reading →

We were talking about this at dinner last night, so I just went online to do 5 minutes of research.  My position was confirmed: for the typical non-finance person (like an ordinary university professor), there is no low-information cost product … Continue reading →

Santa Clara County, once known as Valley of Heart\’s delight due to its abundant fruit and vegetable production, has lost almost half of its farmland, much of it to sprawling urban development with little access to healthy foods.This pattern of … Continue reading →

Read “A Mistake” by Akhil Sharma in The New Yorker.  After the last sentence (of a 30 minute read), take a test on generalized empathy for strangers, neighbors, co-ethnics, misanthropes, bullies and snarks.  You’ll be more empathetic than your “self … Continue reading →

In March 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King traveled to West Africa to attend Ghana’s independence ceremony. King’s voyage was symbolic of a growing global alliance of oppressed peoples and was strategically well timed; his … Continue reading →

It’s not at all clear, for starters, that the fetus has a good chance of surviving inside the womb or of flourishing outside of it. In a study of a few dozen cases of continued pregnancies inside brain-dead women, only … Continue reading →

La rumeur avait annoncé le Larlé Naaba Tigré, Victor Tiendrébéogo à l’état civil, démissionnaire du CDP. Il a avait été le seul des 70 députés du groupe parlementaire CDP a n’avoir pas signé la déclaration de soutien au Président du … Continue reading →

So my classroom was very warm… and I mentioned David Johansen….

OMFG this novel is so friggin great!  As a set, The Concubine, The Slave and The Great Ponds should have gotten Amadi the Nobel Prize for literature.  These are perfect novels.  The dialogue is amazing.  The Concubine starts off with … Continue reading →

What happened was, I started singing “slip away” to myself, and I couldn’t place it, and I knew it was one of the saddest things I had ever heard sung and then of course I remembered it was Lou Reed. … Continue reading →

In Burkina Faso, men and women 25 years and older completed on average less than one year of schooling via International Education Statistics.