Recent content by Robert Urbanek

Can I sue AARP for addictive games? An AARP game promotion: Do you love Bubble Shooter? Get ready for a whole new dimension of excitement with Bubble Tower 3D, the addictive puzzle game where strategy, precision, and quick thinking stack up to big wins! Now that tech giants can be sued for...

The Love of the Irish

On two occasions, the roll of toilet paper in one of my bathrooms began unrolling on its own, with the tissue nearly reaching the floor. Once it happened while I was sitting on the toilet, the other time when I was out of that room but could hear the tissue unraveling. The window was not open...

Despite his protests that climate change is a hoax, Trump’s actions involving Canada, Greenland and Venezuela suggests he wants and is planning for a hot planet. He knows global warming will create shipping and naval routes around Greenland, and he wants Canada as a 51st state so U.S. citizens...

The rise in obesity in the U.S. seems to parallel the fall in the number of people smoking. Did one oral fixation, eating, replace the other oral fixation, smoking, and diabetes replace lung cancer? Apparently, Americans need to put something in their mouth to change their mood when they are...

The upcoming Slate electric pickup truck, with roll-down windows and no radio in the base version, will sell for an estimated $25,000. According to Slate Automotive, over 100,000 people have already placed $50 reservations on the vehicle. How basic a vehicle would you settle for, whether...

“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that is the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn’s account of her 1930’s globetrotting in a 1969 issue of The New Yorker. And thus also begins Ariel Levy’s December 1, 2025 review looking back at that...

I'm leaning toward a more fatalistic attitude and the belief that history is a story, and all stories must come to an end.

“The Big Ice Is Sick,” a Dec. 1 article in The New Yorker, laments the plight of Inuits in Greenland: Toxic chemicals are concentrated in the whale and bear meat they eat; tourism scares away the narwhales; and alcoholism plagues communities idled by lack of opportunities. So, what was the Inuit...

Were Brown University students targeted because of the university’s adoption of pro-Israel policies? The attack on December 13 by a male assailant, two days before the start of Hanukkah, took the lives of two students and wounded nine others. In July, the Trump administration agreed to restore...

A U.S. warship targeted a boat carrying jewel thieves. The survivors were clearly not incapacitated. They were trying to get the boat back up and continue their mission.

Leonardo DiCaprio by Leonardo da Vinci