: About Me

I'm 47, a father of three, and I'm from working-class Massachusetts. My dad installed phones for a living, and my mom was a nurse. I grew up fishing, playing soccer before it was big, and playing woodwinds.

I took well to school, went to MIT, and finished with a doctorate in 1985 (mechanical engineering). If anyone needs a mechanics and biomechanics expert, I'm available. I've testified a bunch in court if it comes to that.

I do a lot of hands-on work. I renovate my house and fix my car when I can, and I do a fair amount of measurement work in my job.

I write to stay sane, mostly, and I've written a bunch of letters to the editor at the Globe which have been published. I've shown some of the other stuff I've written to a few friends and they liked it, so I'm putting some of it out on the web.

My passion is ...

writing and playing music

I know too much about ...

Mechanics and Biomechanics

My parents always told me ...

You're a good kid.

My childhood ambition ...

To be a junk man.

My favorite memory ...

going off to college

Why I write ...

To relax, to think things through, and to stay sane.

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Lately, the news.

My first job ...

Cleaning the kitchen in a nursing home

My best moment ...

Besides my kids' births, finishing my doctorate

My inspiration ...

It changes. I'm looking right now.

Politics, News & Issues > Political & Economic Theory Are we seeing a revival of extremist ideologies

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Portrait of a Militant I recently got a chance to read Jean-Paul Sartre's short essay "The Portrait of an Anti-Semite" and it has wisdom that goes well beyond the subject. Given an unsympathetic, and even repulsive subject, Sartre was able to pull apart pieces of the personality in ways that would otherwise be cruel, but the analysis was tolerable as set out. What's intriguing is that the blind spots and the attitudes of Sartre's anti-Semite are exemplary of a lot of the attitudes that tend to crop up in a lot of people on both the right and the left in this country. The traits do tend mor...

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