Mortal Coil @kmcwalter - Tumblr Blog

Spring in Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna (and on a beautiful Austrian lake...)

Longevity Politics and the Coming Boomer Doom

In my speculative novel Lifers, longevity suddenly explodes, and very old people begin to overpopulate the globe, creating a host of social and political problems, including housing shortages, the crash of social welfare programs, and a drastic reduction in intergenerational transfers of wealth. In the book, which is set in the near future, people call it the “Methuselah Plague,” but in real…

"Lifers" breaks rank

Pleased to note that my speculative novel about the consequences of engineered longevity, Lifers, today broke into the top 100,000 in sales rankings on Amazon, putting it near the top 1% of book sales on that platform. Thank you, dear readers, and please keep it up by spreading the word! Reviews on Amazon are a big boost too, and I welcome your comments. But do remember that Lifers is available…

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Space Boy Redux

As Artemis II speeds through the void, memories of other moon missions return, and with them this post from July, 2019 In the summer of 1969 I was almost twenty, between my sophomore and junior years of college, and working as a greenskeeper’s assistant at a public golf course in a remote suburb of Pittsburgh. Actually, “greenskeeper’s assistant” is a grandiose way of saying I was an untrained…

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A Month in Paris (including an eclectic restaurant guide)

#boutique hotels #French hotels #Paris #tourism #travel #versailles

A Bastille Day (and night) at Airelles Chateau de Versailles

It’s Bastille Day, 2025, and as a pleasant interruption to our month-long stay in Paris, we’re off to Versailles to spend the day and night in the Airelles Chateau de Versailles. Airelles is a high-end hotel chain with outposts in Courchevel, St. Tropez, and Venice. We’ve read a lot about their relatively new hotel a half an hour south of Paris, the only hotel on the very grounds of the Chateau…

#Bastille Day #boutique hotels #Paris #tourism #travel #versailles

The “Longevity Imperative” for Higher Ed

Law and Learning Leaders Need to Say No

In the tumult of distractions and insults fomented by the Trump administration, it’s hard to know where to focus one’s anxiety. But there are two cultural institutions so central to my adult life and instrumental in shaping who we are as a society that to see them under systematic assault prompts personal pain: the legal bar, and higher education. More than a dozen major law firms have come under…

A Brief History of Трuмпостан (Trumpostan)

Few of us perceived the glorious horizon that had opened up to the citizens of what is now Трuмпостан (Trumpostan) when Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as President of the then United States. As we approach another Trumpostan Liberation Day, we must remind ourselves that it was only a few short years ago that President Trump declared Volodymyr Zelensky to be the “dictator” of Ukraine, and that…

Istanbul and the Maldives (Kudadoo Private Island and the Peninsula Hotel Istanbul)

Herewith, an unvarnished diary of the Spoiled Guest’s 12-day trip to the Maldives, via Istanbul, late last year: October 30 -31, 2024 The Turkish Airlines check-in desks at JFK Terminal 1 are unmanned when we arrive in late afternoon. (turns out they only open 4 hours before the next flight, note to self), so we cool our heels in the distinctly downscale food court for an hour and a half. Would…

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A Requiem for Duty, Redux

When, after the 2020 election, Mitch McConnell proclaimed that Donald Trump had every right to question the outcome of the presidential election in court, I tried to react like the lawyer I am. McConnell was of course correct; any fool can file almost any claim whatsoever, no matter how flimsily grounded, in some court or another, and there’s essentially nothing to stop it. You might not get past…

A National Day of Irony

A modest proposal: in honor of this one, January 6th of every subsequent presidential inauguration year should be declared a National Day of Irony. We all think we know irony when we see it, but it’s not so easy to define. Dictionary definitions tend to focus on irony in speech, where it’s often indistinguishable from sarcasm, as in “I just can’t wait for my next colonoscopy.” In art forms like…

At the Aman New York

As we prepared to depart after a three-night stay in the Aman New York, my wife commented that there was one thing (and only one) that she would miss about this grand hotel: the toilet. She meant the fully electronic Toto toilet in the vault-like water closet of our room, with its warm seat and every bidet spray, flush intensity and other adjustment you could dream of in a toilet. It even opened…

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#Aman #boutique hotels #luxury New York hotel #New york city #tourism

Notes from the Aftermath

Since the election, I’ve been waiting for insight, hoping for an explanation. None has arrived. And at this point, almost a month after election day, none is likely to. The unanswered question, the question whose answer has eluded not only me, but every pundit I’ve read, is how so many Americans – very nearly half of all voters – could cast their vote for someone so blatantly unfit to be…

Toward a Better “Project 2025”

We’ve heard a lot recently about “Project 2025,” a policy paper released by the conservative Heritage Foundation that was initially positioned as a transition guidebook for a second Trump administration, but which Trump promptly claimed to know nothing about (because who but him can have any ideas he would subscribe to?). Its guiding premise – not entirely insane – is that the federal bureaucracy…

It Won't Be a Landslide Anymore...and That's a Problem

Joe Biden’s belated decision not to seek reelection has turned the Democratic prospect of almost certain defeat in November into one where victory seems at least possible. Not probable — given the abruptness of the anointment of Kamala Harris as the party’s standard bearer, the policy baggage she carries, and American voters’ proven reluctance to elect a woman as head of state — but at least…

The Hunt for "Motive" in the Attempt on Trump

Of the many reactions to the recent attempt on Trump’s life at his rally in Butler, PA, surely the most misguided is the need on the part of investigators and the media to assign a motive to the would-be assassin, to discover what “ideology” might have driven him to fire upon the rally, nick Trump in the ear, kill an innocent bystander, and get himself promptly shot to death. It’s no surprise…

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