ArcaMax

Most of you of a certain age (say, above 30) should immediately recognize the name Andy Rooney (1919-2011). He was the grumpy, often whiny, scruffy and bushy eyebrowed, always honest TV commentator, whose five-minute segment closed the "60 Minutes" program from 1978 to 2011. Tick tick tick tick tick tick...

Once called "America's Grouch-in-...Read more

Joe E. Moore. If you don't recognize the name, it's fine; there is no reason why you should.

I met Joe, his work rather, in a most serendipitous manner. I was in one of those Washington, D.C., conference hotels relaxing inside a courtesy lounge stocked with refreshments and snacks (yes, those shiny green apples and macadamia nut cookies).

The ...Read more

It's any given morning on any given week in 2023. Millions of Americans wake up without internet: no access to email, Facebook or online news. Foreign hackers have breached the security of energy and transportation grids and corporate and government computers, affecting everything from traffic lights to air travel to bank ATMs. American ...Read more

"What the (expletive)?" That's how one of my University of Central Florida colleagues reacted when she walked into a Wawa and saw a copy of Tuesday, Feb. 14's Orlando Sentinel, its front-page headline reading: "DeSantis Ponders Ending AP Classes for Florida Students."

When we ran into each other later that morning, she shared the news and her ...Read more

The uses, and abuses, of ChatGPT and similar platforms coming through the AI pipeline are infinite. As discussed in Part I of this column, if prompted, it can produce "poetry": choose the genre -- sonnet or haiku? In seconds, it can spit out essays, plots of novels, news reports, screenplays, titles, scientific abstracts, business plans, college...Read more

First it was accountants (TurboTax), then travel agents (Expedia), then translators (Google Translate), now, us writers (ChatGPT), which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a creation of OpenAI launched in November 2022.

I concluded my March 13, 2021, column on the subject of Google Translate pondering: "Will I someday receive a...Read more

The term "Third World" discussed in Part I of this column overlaps with, but is not synonymous with other economic and geopolitical terminologies applied to specific nations and regions including W.W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth model: "traditional" or "pre-modern" (as opposed to "modern"); "underdeveloped" (as opposed to "developed"), ...Read more

I am often asked how I come up with topics for my columns, one every week. It wasn't easy at first, I respond, but once you have been doing it for a while, ideas begin to flow naturally. It helps that we live in such convulsed, rapidly changing times.

I write two types of columns: the first are "off the headlines" (i.e., three I wrote last year...Read more