Dragonfly in my backyard. Photo: M. Andreas Vallianatos. Why do we tell stories? Some friends were wondering how I spend my days. I told them I write most of the time. I explained my books and essays are invisible conversations, if not with the present, at least with the future. I keep asking questions about life, all of its gigantic spectrum: biological, social, political and historical. I published my first academic article in 1969. I was then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin writing my dissertation about a Greek intellectual, Adamantios Koraes, and the Greek Revolution. I am still writing Greek history and tell stories that mirror my anxieties about our times: neither classical nor paradigmatic of civilization. The magic of music Yet each time I start typing, I am listening to traditional Greek music or classical music. The sounds and the lyrics of Greek songs have such an uplifting on my mind and being, I see the world always in a new l...

Unacceptable meddling of the Supreme Court Once again, the  Supreme Court  showed its undemocratic and misogynist colors. It came down against women, encouraging employers not to pay for birth control services. The Supreme Court is obviously catering to the fashionable superstitions of religious preachers who resent the struggle of women for dignity and equality. The judges are also woefully ignorant the planet has too many people. Unchecked population growth has detrimental effects on human beings and life in the natural world. The crime of the Catholic Church In addition, the gigantic  Catholic Church  received 1.4 billion dollars from the government’s corona virus fund. Some of the money is going to dioceses that covered up the crimes of their clergy  raping children .  I find this misuse of public money extremely inappropriate. Priests and bishops of the Catholic Church have been raping boys and girls, especially young boys, for deca...

Europeans and Greeks I was working on a powerpoint presentation on the history of the Greek Revolution and came across the  Memoirs  of John Makriyiannis. This was an important fighter and leader who sacrificed everything for the cause of freeing Greece from its abominable Turkish tyrants.  Makriyiannis was illiterate. However, he had a broad knowledge of Greek and European history. He understood the value of being able to read and write. After the Greek Revolution and at age thirty-two, he mastered writing and reading primarily in order to tell us his story.  That story was the voice of an angry general who had won battles against the Turks, risen to the highest military ranks, and lived through the extreme humiliations of the Turkish tyrannical rule of his country. Furthermore, he was a witness of how the European powers treated Greeks and Turks. He shamed the European states for siding with the Turkey in the early 1820s: perpetually bringing food...

Corrupt Legislation by by Elihu  Vedder, 1887. Thomas Jefferson Building, Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. I have watched carefully the governing of America since the late seventies when the Georgian farmer Jimmy Carter entered the White House.   The DDT explosion In 1979, I joined the US Environmental Protection Agency where I served as an analyst until 2004. Those twenty-five years gave me a privileged opportunity to observe the workings of the government from within. I applauded EPA for banning DDT in 1972, about two years after President Richard Nixon brought the EPA into being.  DDT was not an obscure chemical. It was the muddled manufactured icon of modernity and cleanliness and health. The US military used it against malaria and any possible disease the troops brought home from the battlefields of World War II.  In addition to its war assets, DDT soon became the golden bullet of farmers and public hea...