“Floating through space on the wings of Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts were, are, the so-called Pioneer plaques, humankind’s early-1970s ‘messages in a bottle’ to the universe. If and when they are ‘received,’…

“Those 28 moves have taken me from a subur­ban Californian home surrounded by poppies and bird-of-paradise plants to an apartment in Kolonaki with a Corinthian maid and a view of the Parthenon. Then,…

“Your only child, I am now seven years older than you were the day you died. (I marvel at children who, through one mishap or another, never meet their fathers, lost as men…

“But Verne seems not to have a similar ‘governor.’ And I believe men, especially young men, are genetically programmed to view, and treat, themselves as cannon fodder. Not only do they generally overestimate…

“I now accept that Keats’s words are not ‘immortal’—no one will read sonnets (nor read anything) when the last Homo sapiens is gone. No sentient being will recall what language even was, when…

“Whichever head you listen to, the bark may be slightly different but the bite is the same: vote Republican in 2016 and you’re voting for the whole Tea Party megillah. It’s a nativist,…

“In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party has been hijacked by a demagogue. Along with everyone else in the twittering class, I’ve waited several months too long to make…

“I have known, for decades, that American discourse was degenerating into babble; that the American academy was becoming, more and more, a dumbed-down, profit-based, high-school-equivalency engine; that American society was devolving into race-,…

“Donald Trump is an ugly, ugly man. He has a face which expresses, to perfection, his inner monster. He wears a bloated body which, like Jabba the Hutt’s (down to the near-naked trophy…

“So . . . Once upon a time, O Best Belovéd, these were the books that made me a reader and writer; the books that made me me, to a very large extent;…