Listen to “Paper Losses” by Fred Smith   Several years ago I read an article using the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky to illustrate the brain’s reaction to gain and loss. It seems the amount of pleasure we receive from a gain of  $1000 is not equal to the amount of sadness we feel about a loss of the same amount. In fact, according to their findings, we are two times as sensitive to loss as we are to gain, and it would take a $2,000 gain to offset the pain of our $1,000 loss. Our capacity for regret seems to outpace our capacity for happiness by at…

Listen to “The Great Wave of Schism” by Fred Smith   Once upon a time, according to geologist Alfred Wegener in his 1912 book “The Origin of Continents and Oceans”, all the continents formed one large land mass called Pangaea. Three hundred million years ago, Earth didn’t have seven continents, but instead one mammoth supercontinent surrounded by a single ocean. The several continents fit together like a puzzle. For about 100 million years the puzzle held together but then with the shifting of the underlying tectonic plates the entire mass began drifting apart. No doubt, there had been minor breaks and smaller new formations but on the whole, Pangaea had…

Listen to “His Mother’s Son” by Fred Smith   Over the holidays I had time to think again about images of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Traditionally, what is our picture of Mary? An innocent virgin, humble servant, frightened by losing the young Jesus who has stayed behind in Jerusalem. She is the patient mother at the wedding at Cana wisely telling the stewards to do whatever Jesus tells them and ask no questions. She is the mourning figure standing beneath the cross while Jesus is crucified and, finally, a widow adopted by John at the end. How is she presented to us in art and music? Always young, beautiful…

As some of you know, I enjoy taking pictures – and then finding something to say.

Listen to “Sisters: A Christmas Story” by Fred Smith   I’ve been reading this week about the disaster of Sumner Redstone’s family. While Sumner built great business ventures in CBS and Viacom, his personal life and that of his entire family is a tale filled with betrayals of trust, conflicts of interest, lawsuits against each other, theft, shady ethics, deceit and greed that steadily consumed them. It is a dismal story played out in families from the beginning of time. It’s not Cain’s spontaneous and raging murder of his brother, Abel. It is the slow and measured killing of love over time. It is the story of sisters Rachel and…

Listen to “Haters” By Fred Smith   Facebook is not the place for subtlety and we all know that.  Yet, this week I posted a spoof from the Babylon Bee and several good friends took it seriously. I know I should file disclaimers, but I don’t. It was the one telling us that scores of Trump supporters were abandoning him because he preferred McDonald’s over Chick-fil-A. I thought it was funny and said more about the fickleness of supporters than the animus of his detractors. However, one of my friends made a comment about evangelicals who are “Trump haters” and ignore the fact that God has used imperfect leaders and…

Listen to “Place and Power” by Fred Smith   If you want well-written insight into the work of speechwriters and their behind-the-scenes influence, I would suggest Barton Swaim’s book, “The Speechwriter.” Its soul-searching honesty about the conflicts, challenges and moments of both praise and despair are good reading. Some of our finest pundits, commentators, and authors have served as speechwriters. I am thinking of Michael Gerson (for George W. Bush), Peggy Noonan (for Ronald Reagan), and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (for John F. Kennedy). Standing somewhere between press secretaries, diarists and fiction writers, they all wrestled with finding words for individuals who were often not, with some exceptions, gifted with language.…

Listen to “The Glitter is Gone” by Fred Smith In the past there has always been an unspoken bond between the very rich “one percent” of our world and the rest of us. During the Great Depression, people flocked to the movies to escape the harshness of their lives and catch a momentary peek at the one percent who were doing well. For years, the most popular movies were those with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers floating around dance floors in formal wear, drinking champagne and enjoying the life of high society. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bleak, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me…They…

  Listen to “Quo Vadis?” by Fred Smith Haley was five when she came to me and said she wanted to set up to sell lemonade in the front yard.  Not being the craftsman my father was, I hammered together a very wobbly cardboard and wood stand.  After she laid out her cups, pitcher and money box, I stepped inside the house for maybe two minutes.  When I returned she was gone – along with the pitcher and cups. Yes, I did panic. I looked down the street and saw her two houses away ringing the bell. I ran and asked her where in the world she was going. She…

Listen to “The Thing With Feathers” By Fred Smith   Watch the SYFY channel and one of the obvious changes you’ll see is the apocalyptic nature of so much science fiction today. It’s all about the end of the world as we know it with either invasions or self-destruction. Being now in my 70’s, I started thinking about what science fiction was like when I was growing up. It was not apocalyptic at all. It was futurist and optimistic – even a bit naïve. Yes, it was something of a paradox to be huddled beneath our wooden desks shielding ourselves against the near-certain nuclear blasts while reading Tom Swift piloting an…