Third Goal

A Different Way to Achieve Immortality

I opened the paper some months ago and came across a funny article about ear hair that transported me back to my Peace Corps days in village India, over half a lifetime ago. The article was by local columnist David Shapiro, who must be about my age – give or take a few summers – because he wrote, quite entertainingly, about a battery-powered ear- and nose-hair trimmer, a gift idea for males, like me, who have started on their second half-century. “Can you imagine if teen-agers had...

Postscript to history

All the attention to the 40th anniversary in 2009 of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, reminded me of my own peculiar little footnote to this historic event. At the time, I was a Peace Corps volunteer living in the north-central Indian village of Rajnagar (rough translation: Kingston) where I was working, together with my colleague Jagdish Prasad Mishra, a "village level worker" (i.e., an agricultural extension agent), to help the local farmers increase their wheat...

Images from India