Lifestyle

Dear Meg Whitman, Do you take trains, drive cars? Do you ever need health services? Do you have good furniture? Sleep well near nuclear power plants because they are well contained? Do you buy things in supermarkets? For every dependable service or product, and in many other contexts, somewhere there is a well-controlled software, running on a well-controlled Operating System – OpenVMS. These software products are the result of decades of precise programming, inscribed in precise coding imperative for such functional necessities. A majority of them use functions specific to OpenVMS and still run on OpenVMS, as these custom features are hard to find elsewhere. In June 2013, however, it was announced that OpenVMS would be reaching its end-of-life and no longer be used with new hardware...

Dear Holy Father, You probably are getting some heated reactions these days from my compatriots, the Turks. The reason is obvious: You used the word “genocide” when referring to the “Great Catastrophe” that the Ottoman Armenians went through a century ago. Many Turks, including members of the Turkish government, were furious, reacting with cries of “how dare you!” They consider the “G-word” an insult, and thus lash out everyone who dares to use it. I should perhaps begin by saying that as a Turk myself, I do not approve of these knee-jerk reactions. You have the right to interpret history in the way you see it, and no one can blame you for that. The world’s temporal governments, whose ambitions for power almost always curtail their devotions to Truth, especially should have little...

Dear President Philip, Probably the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your university complaining about your decision. If you want to argue that I can't really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated with SUNY Albany, I wouldn't disagree. But I cannot let something like this go by without weighing in. I hope, when I'm through, you will at least understand why. On October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs. Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure -- in fact, you stated that this...

Your Holiness: Grace and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ. Remembering with pleasure our meeting in Washington some years ago, I am prompted to write by what I once hoped was a common concern for the unity of Christ’s Church and a shared commitment to bridging the chasm that opened between America and Russia during the Cold War. I say “once hoped,” because, in all candor, some of your recent public comments on the trials of Ukraine have inflicted new wounds on the Body of Christ while exacerbating tensions in world politics. I refer specifically to your charge that “the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is engaging in direct political activities, unfortunately, using sharp Russophobic slogans and statements and making sharp statements against the Russian Orthodox Church in its...