Paul Krugman

There was a time when I waited for Paul Krugman to come to my door every Monday morning.

I waited in a way that if you were to see me waiting you'd see I waited as if my life depended on waiting.

Paul Krugman would come to my door inside "The New York Times", which was delivered every Monday morning by a hispanic woman from Daly City who drove a red car through the streets of San Francisco delivering the Times to other people who were also waiting for Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman saved my life when I was living in Los Angeles and could make no sense of the country I was living in.

It was 2003, we were at war in Iraq leading "the coalition of the willing" to the "mission accomplished." It was a dark time that seems to have become only darker.

Paul Krugman published a book, The Great Unraveling, a collection of the things he'd written in "The New York Times", and I read it, gaining the kind of comfort that comes from clear explanation even if that explanation is difficult to bear.

From then on I've turned to Paul Krugman, waiting for his clear explanation of things I'd otherwise have no hope of understanding.

His review in "The New York Review of Books" of the Yale economiist William Nordhaus's new book, The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World ('Gambling with Civilization", NYR, Nov. 7, 2013) leads me to believe that we're currently running the world on the past--fossil fuels--and not on the future.

And that waiting for Paul Krugman to come to my door in the form of "The New York Times" delivered by an automobile which burns fossil fuel, increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is a extremely outdated way to get the news.