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5 days ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
I have been thinking a lot recently, but I don’t want to make a habit of it because it is such hard work. I started thinking for myself at the age of about twenty-five. Most young men don’t think at all before that age, as the crime statistics, traffic accident figures, and maternity statistics prove. Some men never think for their entire lives, as any woman will confirm. Thinking is simply the coherent connection of one thought with another in search of the answer to a problem.
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1 week ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
A few years ago, we made a brief visit to Albania as part of an Adriatic cruise. The tour included a visit to Tirana, the capital, and its Museum of Albanian history. It really has been quite a history. Albania was called Illyria in the ancient world. Shakespeare imagined iy as a magical world in the play Twelfth Night, and many strange things happened there both in fiction and in fact.
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2 weeks ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
The commencement season is upon us, and it will be over in a few days. The hired robes are returned, and the textbooks are thankfully disposed of, leaving thousands of parents feeling relieved and the young graduates feeling slightly lost. I can’t remember my own graduation, but I do remember the enormous sense of relief afterwards. The world was my oyster; I could do anything. But nothing works out quite the way you expect.
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3 weeks ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
There is a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Copper Beeches,” that includes a scene in which Holmes and Watson are travelling through the countryside in a train. Watson remarks how peaceful it all looks, and how innocent must be the lives of people in those picturesque, isolated cottages. Holmes contradicts him at once.
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1 month ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
I keep seeing articles about the “epidemic of loneliness,” suggesting that being alone is unnatural and even a kind of torture. But loneliness is just another name for solitude, and solitude is something that people used to treasure. Obviously, we can’t be happy without some human contact. We are a sociable species; that’s how we survive. We have the self-protective herd instinct that tells us that it is safer to conform, follow the leader, and go with the crowd.
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1 month ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
Springtime is a romantic time of year: blossoms, allergies, weddings. Experts have been predicting for decades that the institution of marriage is dying out. But every spring, I find myself almost running off the road by gigantic white limousines, racing from one wedding ceremony to the next. We live near a spot much favored for wedding photographs and, every weekend for the next few months, the happy couples will be lined up like jets waiting to land.
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1 month ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
It is quite remarkable that at this moment of history when more than a billion of people live in dire poverty and hunger, tens of thousands are dying in ugly wars over money and power, there are a hundred million refugees, and, even in peaceful and affluent countries, thousands are losing their jobs for purely political reasons - that at this moment Mr. Elon Musk should decide to announce on social media that we, as a civilization, have too much empathy.
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1 month ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
Imagine this: We are in the remote Roman province of Britannia, in a small town called Camulodunum, later named Colchester. It is raining, of course, and the soldiers of the Roman garrison are sheltering in their fort beside the river. You can still see the ruins of the fort. The year is AD60, and, in the town, tax collectors are at work because it is the 14th of April, or Aprilis as the Romans called it in their whimsical way.
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2 months ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
New techniques of identity theft pop up almost every day, and identity snatchers are becoming more prolific and smarter. They can copy your voice from a few brief words on the phone or recording, clone your whole appearance using AI, change your checks, change your address and phone number, and probably steal your health records and income tax returns in order to laugh about them.
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2 months ago | 
wshu.org | David Bouchier
Tomorrow is the first day of April, April Fools’ Day, when traditionally, we are expected to play practical jokes and be the good-natured victims of jokes played by others. We used to creep around warily on April 1, expecting a trap of some kind. Everybody got into the act. I remember that once, BBC television in London broadcasted a program about the Italian spaghetti harvest, showing diligent peasants cutting long strings of spaghetti hanging from trees.
