Here’s a set piece, so to speak, written for the newspapers.  The title refers to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, a fashionable book in my college years, and is a pun suggested by my friend, Fayette Hickox.  It was about the coming drastic changes wrought by the technological advances of the 60s, and had an apocalyptic […]

Three years ago this spring I wrote an op/ed piece for the New York Times (my third) about the then raging “natives versus exotics” controversy. They called it “Border Wars” and it contained a typo (8,000 versus 12,000 years ago for the recession of the last glaciers, due to my confusion over BC and AD).  […]

Thanks one and all for the thoughtful feedback about Space Genie.  It was meant to be light-hearted.  Please understand I shall not post readers’ mean-spirited attacks or dyspeptic rants. Sorry if I slightly missed the mark. I appreciate “true believers” and understand your passions. Maybe I’m a bit the same way. I was attempting humor, […]

“Nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit”, I muttered to myself last week as I wove around Manhattan.  My midtown hotel was practically empty and the traffic light for mid-December—a terrible season for retailers.  In the hotel bar guests stared glumly at each other, mostly Brits and Europeans.  The waitress said, “A […]

The Great Financial Meltdown of 2008 has left investors and politicians stupefied, collectively scratching their heads in the absence of real explanations or solutions. Pundits sagely call for greater “transparency,” so investors, regulators and the public might better assess an offering’s underlying value. What we really want is VISIBILITY. Wall Street’s savvy insiders basically couldn’t […]

The newspaper and magazine industries continue their steep slide into oblivion.  At risk, literally, is the public square, since newspapers emerged a couple hundred years ago in order to deliver the news—and often rules and regulations—individually to the newly literate and urban citizens who used to receive it from the town crier, or read it […]

“Bamboo” view from the south Photo by Kenneth Ek The artist, Steve Tobin, found unusually patterned scrap metal up near Reading. There used to be dozens of steel mills and hundreds of fabrication shops in southeastern PA, an embarrassment of riches to a sculptor. “Bamboo” view from the north Photo by Kenneth Ek I worked […]

I just spent a long weekend attending a wedding in San Francisco at the Embarcadero Hyatt down near the water, the old Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. The city rises up from there so I walked a lot—up to Chinatown, North Beach and over to the old Tenderloin, as well as along the Embarcadero, […]

Photo by Dean Fosdick This is the study where our founder, W. Atlee Burpee, wrote the Burpee annual seed and plant catalogues from 1889, when he bought Fordhook Farm and moved his family up from Philadelphia, until his passing away in 1915. From 1875 to 1888, he wrote them in his small office in the […]

By Lois Burpee Eight years of boarding school and college menus, and four years of stretching the dollar-a-day budget, while sharing an apartment with a sister or friend in the depression years, were a culinary vacuum, with one exception.  While at Wellesley College, I was introduced to Chinese food.  A group of students who had […]