Back during the time I worked as a production editor at Plenum-and totally unrelated to that work-I ran across a book by one Mark Popovsky, the title of which was best translated into English as Manipulated Science. The style made me think of Solzhenitsyn's multi-volume GULag Archipelago, but the Popovsky book was much shorter, so the enumerations ( Read more... )

I've got an old Mont Blanc Meisterstück №146 fountain pen that's been lying around for years, unused, because the last few times I filled it and tried writing with it, the flow of ink would quickly become excessive and any joy associated with using it to write would be washed away. Research suggested this excessive ink flow is a common problem with ( Read more... )

The weather this past Saturday morning was marvelous and constituted the nearest thing to a gilded invitation that nature could issue to entice me to spend some time in the back yard. So I finished my morning coffee, got dressed, and walked around it for a while, getting reacquainted with the place, and I thought about the future as I did so ( Read more... )

Reporting back to active duty for "infantry training" after my ten-day leave following graduation from Parris Island, I really didn't know what to expect, but whatever it was, it was nothing like this ( Read more... )

The first time I heard of Stoicism was in junior high school, in social studies class ( Read more... )

I and the rest of second platoon had spent the entire day in the field, training. That meant we had marched, crawled, walked, double-timed, and occasionally lay in ambush within the confines of a depressing chunk of North Carolina real estate that was mostly sand, covered here and there with detritus from the pine trees and clumps of underbrush ( Read more... )

A photo surfaced on my desk, recently, of me at a camp one summer over half a century ago. The black-and-white image brought back pleasant memories, and I paused in the course of my day to let them have free rein for a little while ( Read more... )

It was 1976, and the Cold War was on hold, or so they said. "Détente" was on everyone's lips, and while things had gotten to the point where U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts had flown together in space the previous year, bumps remained in the road. A stranger on the street had handed an American diplomat a package wrapped in brown paper, ( Read more... )

My first visit to the venerable Moscow Chess Club took place in November 1975. After depositing my coat in the ample lobby cloakroom, I went upstairs into what, were I baseball fan, would represent Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and the Cooperstown Hall of Fame all rolled into one. I peeked in through the door of an auditorium and saw former World ( Read more... )

A friend of mine, who emigrated from Russia to New York in his youth, observes Christmas according to the Russian Orthodox calendar, on January 7. Early in our friendship, I asked him what it was like to celebrate Christmas almost two weeks after "everybody else." He smiled, thought for a moment, and said that it all boiled down to two main points ( Read more... )