I emphasize history, politics and personal experience. Books on science and pharmacology grow quickly out of date. I don’t know anything about horticulture. Science and Medicine • The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. 486 pages, 2017. […]
In TCRI’s Norman, Is That You?, Ben Chambers (Steven Taschereau), a dry cleaner from Dayton, Ohio, who is just past 50 years old, arrives at the Manhattan apartment of his 23-year-old son, Norman (Michael Capalbo), to tell him that 49-year-old Beatrice (Lisa Scotti-Johnson), Ben’s wife of 26 years and Norman’s mother, has run off to Canada […]
The diary of Anne Frank is among the most widely read historical documents of the 20th century, but its provenance is often misunderstood. There has been endless debate about why this one particular diary by one seemingly ordinary teenaged girl has become the iconic and most recognizable narrative of the Nazi Holocaust. Hundreds if not […]
Civilization itself is the product of rule of law – respect for life, equality of individuals, protection of the weak from the strong – that separates us from the alternative, the so-called “law” of the jungle that is merely complete absence of law. An absolute monarch or dictator “whose word is law” exercises naked power […]
RI has had at least two seats in the US House of Representatives since 1792, following the nation’s first census of 1790. Due to population shifts expected in the upcoming census of 2020, RI is widely anticipated to lose one. Because the US Constitution provides that each state must have at least one seat, RI would […]
The Rhode Island General Assembly, currently comprising a 38-member Senate and 75-member House, long facing criticism for undemocratic processes where decisions are made by a tiny cabal of leaders who punish dissenters by stripping them of committee assignments and their share of patronage pork, has announced plans for significant expansion. “The General Assembly should be […]
A fundamental but strange and counter-intuitive idea of quantum mechanics is that all possible states are in superposition together until resolved by observation. A quantum bit, or “qubit,” in a quantum computer is both 0 and 1 until observed, at which time it resolves to one state or the other. A cat inside a box […]
Our Town by Thorton Wilder is a deceptively simple play to perform, famously requiring neither set nor scenery and few props, and for this reason is popular as a staple of local theater groups – who often perform it badly. Wilder’s stated intent was to strip theater to its essence, meaning that the burden falls […]
Gov. Gina Raimondo’s proposed annual budget seeks a wide variety of new taxes, but the most legally dubious is a tax on “Lobbying Services as defined in §42-139.1-3(a)(3) ([North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code] 541820),” which reads “‘Lobbying’ means acting directly or soliciting others to act for the purpose of promoting, opposing, amending, or […]
[Because of the length of this review, this is the first of two parts: the first part provides an overview of the production and the second part provides some additional detailed historical analysis of the script.] Judaism is ultimately about lineage: Every Jew stands at the current endpoint of more than 3,000 years of history, and almost […]