Is Double Cleansing Really Necessary? Norwegian-born supermodel Frida Aasen has a special glow to her skin. I think we can all agree that the first jet lag mask from Summer Friday’s was not disappointing. We’re exposed to hundreds of thousands of bacteria every single day. Most of these 24 makeup mavens are bilingual. Facial hair …
The question: What is a person? is more complex than it appears. Indeed, when we recognize the complexity of the question, and forget our assumption that a person should be a human being. We can no longer thing of a picture of homo sapiens, Vitruvian Man or his slightly obese contemporary counterpart, so the concept …
In a radio interview with a Dutch correspondent living in Rio, she expressed horror. The most likely president elect of Brazil this coming Sunday, the army captain Jair Bolsonaro, is worse than Duterte, Putin, Erdogan, Orbán and Trump combined. He will usher in a whole new level of autoritarianism. This piece of garbage is against …
Shel Siverstein (1930-1999) was an American painter, poet and songwriter. I read a sweet little poem about the end of the line. Where the sidewalk ends There is a place where the sidewalk ends and before the street begins, and there the grass grows soft and white, and there the sun burns crimson bright, and …
Welcome back professor Trompsky, glad you took your time to talk about the controversial Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. – Thank you. These are very serious matters yes. I think he is the least capable person in America today to become a Supreme Court Justice. Every which way you look at it, this nomination …
A great man is always willing to be little. – Ralph Waldo Emerson A modest little person, with much to be modest about. – Winston Churchill I want to stretch out my tentacles to tackle the idea of modesty. Sound the clarions, hoist the flags, this self-proclaimed writer marches in to lecture about a virtue …
Professor Trompsky, what do you think of the intellectual climate of today? There is a worrying decline of what I call the culture of wisdom. More often than not, people engaging in debates are more concerned with cementing their own argumentation, making their own narrative waterproof as it were. Instead of trying to integrate the …
Mario Wirz (1956-2013) was a German poet and writer who started his career as theater actor and director. I read a poem in a translation by Renate Latimer: the wind in your dream swells the curtains into a sail tears asunder all the things we have collected in the fearful light of the bedside lamp …
Professor Trompsky, welcome to our studio. At 87, do you have any plans for retirement? Listen, the burden of the world rests on my shoulders. I can’t just give up because the fragility that is slowly but certainly shutting down my body. My responsibilities are grand, and with grandure I shall go to the grave. Can …
we burst heartlong through life before the silence we don’t know the probability of a thermonuclear war & other reflections of the mammalian brain ________that rascal! butterfly wings are rife with functionality ________or take phantom limbs we tool like a tool inside a tool & that is confusing too but also wonderful like feeling the …
Last month I posted the above image as a commentary on a Facebook post. The image is a caricature of a campaign poster in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, on which a veiled Muslim woman and a Jew are kissing in front of the iconic Erasmus bridge. I greatly dislike the puritanical culture that Facebook imposes …
Geoffrey Miller’s 2008 book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior about conspicuous consumption uses the relatively new science of evolutionary psychology to analyse modern humans’ consumerist behavior. The bottom line is that we engage in conspicuous consumption to show potential mates, like animals, that we have desirable traits. Through countless examples, some of which are …
