D. Diego Torres
Bio
Writer of nonfiction and fiction, voracious reader of great literature, fan of the horror genre. None of that pays very well, if at all, so I'm thankful for my day job as an institutional research analyst. I really love long weekends.
Stories (13/0)
A New Generation Discovers Thomas Sowell, Part I
Today, Thursday, June 30, 2022, marks the 92nd birthday of one of the most prolific scholars and thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Thomas Sowell. A graduate of Harvard (A.B. in Economics, 1958), Columbia (A.M. in Economics, 1959), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. in Economics, 1968), Sowell has the distinction of having been advised and mentored by both George Stigler and Milton Friedman, both of whom would later be honored with a Nobel Prize in Economics. Brilliant in his own right, he has also held the title of Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution for more than 40 years.
By D. Diego Torresabout a year ago in The Swamp
On Seeing You That First Time
1 I had come to escape the oppressive weight of solitude, hoping to be bombarded by noise louder and less offensive than that of my loneliness. I could not endure another night of being yelled at by the dark corners of my room, refused to be bothered by the incessant screaming of the emptiness, so I ventured out. The invitation announced a 7pm start time. I arrived at 8, well enough into the party to ensure a decent assemblage of potential gabbers. Though I knew I would be among acquaintances and coworkers, I wanted to be doubly sure I would not end up being a wallflower.
By D. Diego Torres2 years ago in Poets
The R.E.S.T. of Our Lives
As the world enters 2022, we are not only leaving behind 2021, but we are saying goodbye to two years of COVID-19 and the various governmental responses or aims to combat its spread. COVID-19 has basically become endemic, with perhaps more people contracting the disease but with less likelihood of hospitalization and far fewer deaths, which is a good thing. And whatever one may think about the ability of so-called government experts to keep us physically safe from a submicroscopic virus, it should be remembered that we human beings are much more than our physical health. Without the other dimensions of health (i.e., the social, environmental, economic, mental, and spiritual) to complement our physical health, there can be no fullness to our existence; we are reduced to mere data points in some researcher’s notebook, a nameless, faceless, formless mass constituting an abstract statistical category.
By D. Diego Torres2 years ago in Motivation
Unhappy Business
Here is a man. He is lying on a thin mattress in a windowless room whose cinderblock walls have the patina of leaves in need of pruning. The room is small, no bigger than an outhouse, complete with a metal toilet anchored to the concrete wall like a spile driven into the trunk of a maple tree. The man has lived in this room, or a room like it, for twenty-one years and in that time the space has become for him a metaphor for life: that, ultimately, we all must live with the stink and shit of what we create. Stink and shit are consequences. And consequences will pursue a man relentlessly, all the way to his deathbed, extracting its due till the bill is settled.
By D. Diego Torres2 years ago in Fiction
