Our economic system is based on irrational consumption. Imagine the businesses and industries that would go belly-up and the people who would be put out of work in short order if consumers suddenly started making only rational purchases. One of the first to go would be the vitamin industry, or more broadly, the vitamin, mineral … More The Economic Benefits of Irrational Consumption

Salesmanship—the skill required to convince people to buy stuff they probably don’t need–has a long history. The techniques of persuasion have gotten infinitely more sophisticated over time. In the 1950s, door-to-door selling was a major way of moving certain kinds of merchandise. The Fuller Brush man was part of the landscape. Many books were written … More Guitar Lessons

I have long thought that liberal Christians and Jews are much closer to atheists than they are to their own more fundamentalist and literalist coreligionists. But some like the biologist Jerry Coyne argue that religious moderates provide cover for the fundamentalists by perpetuating the myth that religion alone can provide us with such things as a … More Transcendence, atheism, and Idolatry

Conversion to Judaism, perhaps to any religion, is similar to learning a foreign language. Without any data at all, I suspect that most converts have a facility for learning foreign languages, a facility that manifests itself in a low sense of cognitive/emotive dissonance– that feeling of being a phony when speaking a foreign language. One … More Conversion and Identity

For Three and a half years I wrote a grammar column for the Edmonton Journal called “Grammar Gaffes.” Since then my views on grammar and usage have evolved considerably. When I wrote the column, I was pretty much a prescriptivist; that is, I believed there were rules of standard grammar and usage that should be … More Pet Peeve

For at least 25 years I worked out regularly at the gym at the University of Alberta. The gym was a short walk from my office in the library, and the convenience made it easy to form such a positive habit. Such an exemplary life style culminated in 2008 in a heart attack. The cardiologist assured … More Staying Hydrated

    When I was a kid, we were at the low end of the working class, but in the 1950s post-war expansion of the economy, even the low end of the working class was actually working. We had many deficits in our lives, but a sense of crushing poverty was not one of them. Everybody … More The Gift of the Bicycle