Green Hills

“Hey! Dad! When does summer start?” An easy one, but he flummoxed me. There were at least three good answers: His summer begins at the close of school, that year noon on June 10th. The culture around him moves towards barbeques and blockbuster movies around the last Monday in May, a holiday. Astronomical summer is…

Care signal

Horace Dediu recently devoted much of two podcasts1 to the word “luxury” and to a gap he identified between the word’s connotations and the underlying phenomenon it labels. He asserts: We cannot use the word “luxury”. It is obsolete.2 because the current implications mislead us so badly. He concludes the podcasts without settling on a…