Author: Tom Purcell

All anybody needs to know about a free economy is alive and well thanks to social media flea markets, such as Facebook Marketplace. While procrastinating every morning, I review this site looking at cars, lakefront homes and a wide variety of highly entertaining items people are trying to hock. Facebook Marketplace offers a hands-on lesson…

What a bunch of BS. BS is all over television, blogs, podcasts and newspapers these days. It’s spouted by politicians and pitched by product spokesmen. Modern life is manufacturing an unprecedented amount of it. Thanks to cable “news” channels and social-media platforms, there are numerous opportunities for people to BS us about all kinds of…

Here’s a story that is growing bigger by the day: Cyber scams are on the rise. My elderly family member fell for a common scam a few weeks ago: His screen appeared to be locked by “Microsoft” and he was urged to call the number the phony security alert displayed. If you call that fake…

Get this: Men’s and women’s brains are different. Using a powerful, first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence model, Stanford Medicine was able to determine with a 90% success rate whether or not an MRI scan of human brain activity was coming from a male brain or a female brain. “The findings, the investigators suggest, help to resolve a…

When I read about the “silent book club” trend, it filled me with instant calm and hope. As it goes, in 2012, two friends in San Francisco came up with the idea for a non-formal social event in which book lovers can gather at a coffee house or pub, then read together in silence for…